


War Between Four Walls [Crucible, Part Two of Two]

by ninemoons42



Series: Crucible [2]
Category: X-Men (Comicverse), X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Magic, Big Bang Challenge, Blacksmithing, F/M, M/M, Magic, PTSD, Phoenix - Freeform, Swords & Fencing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-09
Updated: 2011-12-09
Packaged: 2017-10-27 03:07:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 39,909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/290979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the events of Fire Forged, Erik must deal with his emotions and weigh what he has and what he's lost in the balance. At the same time, he has to help Charles battle his inner demons, <i>and</i> he has to prepare for what is quite possibly the fight of his life. Erik teeters between joy and hope and fear as the drums of war beat and a new song enters his world and his heart.</p>
            </blockquote>





	War Between Four Walls [Crucible, Part Two of Two]

  
title: War Between Four Walls [Crucible, Part Two of Two]

Continues the story begun in [Fire Forged [Crucible, Part One of Two]](http://ninemoons42.dreamwidth.org/190234.html)

author: [](http://ninemoons42.dreamwidth.org/profile)[](http://ninemoons42.dreamwidth.org/)**ninemoons42**  
characters / pairings: Main pairing is Charles Xavier/Erik Lehnsherr. Secondary pairings are Scott Summers/Jean Grey and Mystique/Azazel. Also includes an ensemble cast of X-Men and mutants past and present.  
warnings: Discussion of physical and mental abuse of adults and children; abduction/kidnapping [mentioned/implied]; torture [mentioned/implied]; battle scenes and graphic violence. At least one character exhibiting symptoms of PTSD. Angst and pining. Low-fantasy crapsack world.  
Author's notes, credits, and acknowledgements appear at the end.  
disclaimer: I don't own the original story or the characters. Not making any profit, just playing in the sandbox.  
summary: After the events of Fire Forged, Erik must deal with his emotions and weigh what he has and what he's lost in the balance. At the same time, he has to help Charles battle his inner demons, _and_ he has to prepare for what is quite possibly the fight of his life. Erik teeters between joy and hope and fear as the drums of war beat and a new song enters his world and his heart.

[Credits](http://ninemoons42.dreamwidth.org/189657.html) | The Conjunction of Two Stars [fanmix] [download](http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?zaleft2xfp70aau) \+ [track listing](http://ilovetakahana.livejournal.com/136944.html)

  
 ** _War Between Four Walls_**  
 ** _Crucible_** , Part Two of Two

One

He wakes up all at once, lifts himself up easily onto his elbows, and looks out the window. A clear winter’s sky, a handful of stars like pinpricks of light in the deep purple darkness. It’s a long way towards morning yet, if the shadows on the horizon are anything to go by.

For as long as he can remember, Erik has always loved the winter, has always loved the memories of snow and quiet and great roaring fires. Winter is when he rests, done with the chores and the myriad little tasks of the sunny days. Winter is when he turns his hands to looking after people, after the children of the mountain hamlet and after his soldiers; when he continues on the same path his parents had taken, when he was a child – when they had looked after him during their journeys through forest and over mountain and all the way to the distant ocean. The world’s noises dying down to a reverent hush under a blanket of snow. Maps and trails and fires made out of fragrant wood, pine and ash and smoke.

He thinks of his mother’s voice, sounding out the names of the stars and teaching him his letters and numbers even as she mended their summer clothes, or knitted new hats and scarves for the deep cold months. He thinks of his father’s hands, tracing out constellations in the ground at their feet and coming back from a good day of hunting, laden down with berries and fish and game.

He’s gotten better and better at remembering that his wife never had taken to winter the way he had. She had loved summer best. She had loved warmth and heat and a thousand shades of green. She had loved walking through forests and fording rivers. Never a hint of fear or apprehension in her face. In the years since her death, he’s learned to content himself with remembering, to draw comfort from the wistful smiles caused by the memories of her. The distant sound of her laugh, the light that had danced in her eyes whenever she bestowed one of her rare smiles on him. The wound of her loss, long since healed, and its faint scar on his heart.

Beneath the stars, reflecting their distant pale light: snow as far as Erik’s eyes can see, piled in drifts. A winter full of snow and rain, he thinks, and he looks out at the houses shrouded in darkness from within, covered in snow from without.

In the distance, the quiet of the night is broken by yet another flurry of branches snapping under the weight of the snow, under the freezing cold. A hard winter, such as the mountains seem to have, but in its own way a pleasant one, even enjoyable. The children can’t get enough of the snow and they play games in it at all hours. They sing and they dance and they occasionally fight pitched snow battles among themselves. They laugh themselves breathless; they draw others in with their contagious joy. They seem to stop only for sleep and meals and lessons. A happy industry, one that brings smiles to every face, and Erik can’t get enough of it.

Erik lies back down and he smiles for a long moment, thinking about family and looking forward to the days ahead, to the close of the year. He rests his head briefly on his laced fingers. Then he pushes the thick blanket off his legs and slides his feet into his fur-lined boots.

He knows the hut well enough to unerringly move around it, even blindfolded. navigate it even blindfolded. He knows where his sword and knives are, where the crate that he stows his armor in when he’s not wearing it sits. The neat little bundle of Charles’s black cloak and scarf, in which he wraps his sword and knife for safekeeping.

Erik knows that he has to step carefully around the table and the chairs. It’s easy to navigate when there are only two chairs to be mindful of. He remembers the baskets of clean clothes, the ones that still need mending and the ones that can be taken apart for rags, sitting here and there around the table. He steps out to the necessary and he doesn’t think, simply braces the door open against its creaking hinges – he will really have to repair them as soon as it’s warm enough to start working at the forge again.

Back inside, with the door securely locked and the wind and winter seeping in, Erik feels grateful for the wood and the stone and the warmth provided by the recently re-thatched roof. He shrugs, rubs his hands together for warmth, takes the blanket from his bed and wraps himself in it. His eyes continue their sweep of the house and its comforting half-darkness.

His eyes stop on the shadowed bundle near the fire: Charles in his pallet. Erik looks carefully, and he can just about make out the familiar curve of Charles’s back, huddled into the blankets. Charles sleeps on his side in all seasons and especially during the winter, turned towards the wall, securely tucked in. Impossible to see his face in the shadows, impossible to know if his dreams play out their capricious emotions on his face. Impossible to see what he clutches next to his heart, if there is anything other than the silver cuff on his wrist.

Sometimes Erik wonders whether Charles sleeps the way he does because he thinks about protecting his sister at all times, even in his dreams, even in the deepest sleep.

Erik lifts one of the chairs away from the table, moving as silently as he can. He sits down next to the fireplace and contemplatively stirs the coals with the poker.

There are things that will need doing as soon as the year passes, as soon as they can start thinking about and preparing for spring. For one thing, he is waiting for reports from the men and women serving as their eyes and ears inside the tower of mages, their spies in the armies. Plans for rescue missions and recruiting expeditions; reconnaissance, tactics, supplies. Most important of all, Erik is expecting Logan.

The banked fire glows orange at him, and more brightly, and he thinks about throwing another log into the fireplace, when there’s a muffled gasp.

 _Another_ one?

Charles and his dreams, and during the past three months Erik has seen him in all states of waking and dreaming, and in every state always so apprehensive. What could Charles be seeing, night after night? Waking up, again and again. The soft patter of his steps around the hut, his shadow moving restlessly. The rough murmur of his voice, talking himself to sleep, words Erik tries not to listen to and some he doesn’t even know if he can understand. The few times Charles had left the hut entirely, hours passing before his return, shaking the dust and the rain and the snow from his shoulders.

Erik knows enough of his own emotions – he’s worried, and he doesn’t know what to do with his worry. Show it or hide it? He cannot decide, for Charles to him is still something painfully _new_ , and the bond between them remains nameless and fragile.

Every time Charles slips away in the middle of the night, Erik has stayed awake, moving from his pallet to the table to wait for him, passing the time any way he can. Carving toys for the children, thinking about training regimens, looking over the maps and the information they currently have. Looking up at the door, every now and then, and being torn between relief and worry that there is no one there to see how he frets.

He never has any words for the relief that floods through him when the door opens again and Charles steps back in, regret and pain written on his face.

Erik has had to grow used to Charles’s hand sliding into his: sometimes after he returns, and sometimes when he’s passing by on errands in the village, and sometimes when they are sitting quietly together in the hut. Seeking shelter, and sometimes Erik thinks he feels something that he’s tentatively identified as an apology, Charles apologizing, though he never explains why or what for.

Erik has had to fight back the impulse to simply _comfort_ him, for whatever kind of comfort Charles could need, for whatever kind of comfort Erik could give.

Even now, Erik wants to move; he wants to make sure Charles is all right, but he stays in the chair, forces himself to remain relaxed. He moves his feet closer to the fire. Contents himself with saying the other man’s name, as quietly as he can.

“Charles.”

He watches the knot of limbs and blanket tighten, as though Charles were trying to hide – and then Charles is throwing the blanket off, dark hair falling every which way and most of it into his eyes. The silver cuff reflects the firelight as he moves. Charles sits up slowly, and soon he has his head cradled in his hands. “I was sleeping, and I was warm, and then I was dreaming. Now I’m awake.”

Erik shakes his head at the slurred words. “Are you truly?”

Charles does not reply.

Sometimes, Charles will wake up from his dreams and stay silent for hours. Sometimes he will wake up from his dreams and laugh to himself throughout the day. And sometimes he will wake up from his dreams with his blue-in-blue eyes surrounded by the deep red and orange of fatigue, though he never seems to cry.

Erik raises an eyebrow, quietly perplexed, as Charles gets up from the pallet, pulling his blanket around his shoulders. Two steps to cross toward the fireplace, he’s looming over Erik, and he suddenly and gracefully falls into his usual manner of sitting. Heels tucked neatly beneath, Charles breathes for a few moments, stares into the glowing coals and then it’s all Erik can do to keep Charles upright, as he suddenly lists to the side, eyes sliding closed once again, on a breath that’s almost a sigh.

So that at least answers Erik’s question – not that it’s helping him, not now, not with Charles in a state like this, and Erik torn between worry and the voice in the back of his mind that’s already laughing at the sheer strangeness of their situation.

Erik catches Charles’s shoulder with his hand, pushes at him roughly, trying to keep him in a more or less upright position – and even then, Erik can’t let him go, keeps holding on to him for fear he’ll fall into the fire.

“Charles,” he says, quietly, urgently, “are you all right?” He shakes Charles’s shoulder violently, slides out of the chair to look at Charles’s face.

Charles, insensate, doesn’t even seem to know where he is. Fluttering eyelids, mouth shaping silent words.

Erik blinks, and he moves, settles himself on the floor with his legs crossed. He turns Charles away from the fire. He retrieves his blanket and wraps it around his shoulders – and then he wraps himself around Charles. Now Charles’s lips are murmuring and moving against Erik’s skin.

How to care for a mage, Erik thinks, torn between mirth and surprise and worry and something else, an emotion he doesn’t have a name for. All he knows is that it’s the very same emotion that had driven him to get down on his knees before Charles, all those months ago.

Charles shifts restlessly in his arms and Erik breathes and lets him breathe, the two of them staying quietly wrapped in each other. He remembers that they have been dancing around their emotions. A dance they’ve been tracing out to music only they could hear, the two of them walking strange and winding loops around each other.

And Erik might not know how the dance ends – might not yet want to know where the dance will lead – but this, this at least is something that he knows about, and this is one of the few situations in which he actually knows what to do. He’s seen children unwilling and unable to wake up from memories, from the terrible specters of their nightmares. He’s seen mages tormented by their dreams, images and ideas of the future spinning out behind closed eyes. He’s seen ailing women caught up in the double vice grip of fever and childbirth. He’s seen soldiers facing death, bravely, on some distant battleground.

He thinks about the words he’s used before and he discards the old murmurs with a thought. He holds Charles close, one arm braced around those trembling shoulders and the other holding the blankets closed around him.

“I’m here, I’m here, come back,” Erik says, over and over, and he shakes his head because there must be something else that he can say.

He’s known some better words in the past, he’s used better words before, with another mage who dreamed of an uncertain future – but he can’t say them, not here and not now.

If the dreams go on like this for much longer, he will have to ask Raven, ask her for help or advice, ask about the years she and Charles had spent in the wilderness. Surely she must have picked up some rhyme or phrase to say, some way to bring Charles back.

For now, though, he keeps whispering the same words over and over again, hoping almost against all hope that Charles can hear them, trapped as he is in his dreams. “Charles. Listen to me. Come back. I’m here.”

One of his hands has moved up and is now tangled in Charles’s hair. Silver strands among the dark, almost seeming to glow in the firelight. Charles has let his hair grow a little longer, and now it almost brushes his thin shoulders in soft curls.

Erik pulls Charles closer still, tells himself it’s because it’s a winter night and they need to stay warm together. Charles seems to have calmed himself down a little; at least, Erik knows he is no longer speaking – or whatever it was that he was doing that let fevered breaths move rapidly against Erik’s throat.

Erik closes his eyes in relief, and reluctantly begins to undo the knot that the dreams and the worry and the emotions have made of their bodies.

“Erik?”

Charles’s eyes are wide open when he looks down, and he looks awake and confused and alive, and Erik takes back his arms, moves closer toward the fire, away from Charles, who is left to look at the blankets wrapped around his shoulders. “Calm down, Charles. You were dreaming, and you almost fell into the fire – but you’re awake now. It’s all right. It’s over. Just your dreams.”

He means to be soothing, to be reassuring, but he doesn’t miss the sudden startled hitch in Charles’s breathing, and he instinctively replaces his hand on Charles’s shoulder.

“I’ve woken you up,” Charles says.

Erik shakes his head. “I was awake. Be easy; you didn’t disturb me.” He thinks about keeping his secret, and he thinks that Charles already has all of his secrets. “I woke up, and I was thinking about this winter.”

“I don’t like being cold,” is all Charles says, almost a whisper.

“Neither do I, to be honest,” Erik says as he gets easily to his feet, knowing he’s trying to distract Charles, knowing Charles needs to be distracted. “When I was a child, I never wanted to stop traveling, never wanted to stop seeing new things, and winter always stopped us. But it was hard to resent the cold and the quiet and the need to stay in one place for weeks at a time, not when it meant I could spend time with my parents, not when we could huddle together and laugh.”

Charles looks up, though he isn’t looking at Erik, and there is a sad, wistful expression on that face, an expression that could almost be a smile if not for the lines of pain around the blue-in-blue eyes. “That sounds...that sounds wonderful. A little like the winters I spent alone with Raven, when we were children together.”

“Do you want to tell me about that?” Erik asks as he draws water into one of the pots, as he hooks the pot over the rod in the fireplace. Sweet earthy scent of tea leaves, and the sharp savory bite of dried herbs. Erik’s mother’s recipe, the one that Erik’s been patiently trying to recreate over the years, and each time he makes up a new batch he thinks he’s so close, he’s almost there. A beautiful memory from the past, almost completely restored.

Tucked into the corner of the tea box is a particular group of packets wrapped in coarse cloth, and Erik hesitates over them, feels something inside him draw away from the musty odor and the texture like grit and paper and dust. A unique blend of herbs and a special kind of tea, made for a specific purpose: to put the drinker to sleep. He remembers Jean pressing the packet into his hands after he’d brought Charles back with him, after she’d had a few conversations with the still shocked mage, and her advice: “Only if you think he truly needs it.”

In the end, Erik decides to let Charles make the choice for himself, and he brings the entire box with him when he drops back into his chair next to the fireplace. Charles has already retrieved the cups from their usual place over the mantel, and when Erik looks down at him he’s looking into the flames, he’s running his fingertips over the rim of one of the cups.

He calls Charles’s name, softly, and he watches those eyes blink and focus on him again.

“Erik,” Charles says. A shy smile.

“Were you going to tell me about the winters with Raven?”

Charles’s smile widens a little. A light blush in his cheeks. “I...no, I was going to, but then I looked at the fire and I got distracted.”

“So what did you think about, then.” Erik cocks his head and he can hear the water in the pot boiling, and he takes the pot down carefully, pushes the tea box in Charles’s direction. He pours steaming water into the cups and takes one, carefully, using a corner of his blanket to hold the cup.

When he looks up, Charles is dropping a generous pinch of the usual leaves into his cup, and Erik turns away to hide the expression of relief on his face, and makes his own tea.

Because as helpful as Jean’s tea is – and everyone who drinks it falls into a sleep so heavy that they say they have no dreams and in fact do not move at all – it also has its disadvantages. Erik himself remembers breaking out in a bright red rash all along his arms after one dose, which he’d needed so he could rest after breaking an arm in a riding accident, and his reaction was one of the milder ones, as it turned out. Some of the soldiers have reacted to the tea as though it were a particularly vile type of moonshine, complaining about hangovers after waking up.

And every single mage who’s drunk it has sworn never to touch a drop again, and sometimes in much stronger words. Eliszabeth was struck down by a particularly nasty headache; Shaw complained that he could not feel his feet. Even Emma has tried it, during one of the nights when she refused to dream, and she woke up in tears the next day. Erik still doesn’t know why she cried, but he knows Charles does, since he had been sitting at Emma’s bedside that night.

Erik jerks back to the present when there’s a touch of warmth on his wrist, and he looks up to Charles, and his mouth pinched with concern. “Have you been having trouble sleeping, too? If you were already awake?”

It takes Erik a long time to answer. “No. Not really. It was a passing fancy. I was thinking about that tea that Jean makes, the one in that packet there.”

Charles responds by pulling a disgusted face into his cup, and Erik almost laughs at him, and Charles is smiling and scratching the back of his head with his free hand.

When Charles speaks again, though, he sounds much more serious. “You talked me out of using the tea, Erik, when you first told me about it. When I first came to live here. I’ve not really thought about it since, but perhaps you should know – I almost drank it recently.”

Erik hears his heart pounding in his ears and for some reason, he thinks he knows what Charles is going to speak of. “Is this during or after your sister....”

A laugh that sounds broken, scraped raw around the edges. “After.” He looks haunted, now. “Immediately after.”

Erik remembers the expression well, knowing he’s worn it himself. Charles in the aftermath of the battle with the mage who had kidnapped Raven. Erik remembers the running and shouting as the soldiers and the mages asked after Charles, fearing for his safety as Erik did. He remembers bellowing at them to keep moving, not feeling safe until they reached the mountains.

Shaw slumped over on his horse, exhausted; Emma and Jean riding next to him, and Shaw’s reins clasped in Emma’s hands.

Azzel and Raven, marching side by side. Her eyes scanning the sky, looking back every so often, and the persistent downturn to her mouth. Trying not to be worried. Her hand in a white-knuckle grip around Azzel’s, and the worried pinch in the youth’s face.

Erik remembers straightening to meet Raven’s eyes once her gaze had settled on him, wondering what she already knew, what Charles could have already told her about him. The dread in his heart, hoping that the two of them would not just have had a hasty, _temporary_ reunion.

And then the memory of Charles calling, a single long note on the wind. Erik looking up, Raven stepping to his side – and then Charles falling out of the sky, eyes rolling back in his head, very nearly unconscious. Wings of flame cupping him, folding around him as he crashed gracelessly to the ground.

Erik and Raven looking at each other, and then rushing to him, voices calling behind them, concern and shock. Jean shouting for everyone to keep going, and the knife-edge of fear in her voice.

And Charles curled up on the ground at the foot of a tree. Conscious just long enough to smile. One hand reaching out for Raven. His lips, shaping Erik’s name.

After a day like that, after a fight like that, Erik thinks that perhaps Charles would have had the right of it. He beckons the mage closer, and they sit shoulder to shoulder in front of the fire. The quiet of the night is broken by the pop and crackle from the flames. “If you had taken that tea,” he says, after a long moment, “I would have helped you deal with whatever effects it might have had on you.”

Charles nods, and keeps drinking. “Do you know, I wasn’t even thinking about how I’d react to it. I just...I wanted to forget what I’d just seen. I wanted to forget that dream I had, while I was in the collar.”

Erik doesn’t think, doesn’t pause to consider what he’s doing – he puts his arm around Charles’s shoulders again, makes him lean closer. He kisses the top of Charles’s head, a chaste and fleeting touch. “Forgive me; I did not even think to ask what that mage had done to you. It is a small and distant consolation that you suffered only briefly. Speak about it now if you wish, or not,” and Erik hopes he’s reading the fine trembling of Charles’s shoulders correctly, hopes he understands Charles’s fear and his pride and his anxiety all at once. “But not until you’re ready.”

Charles says, “I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready.”

“Then be easy,” Erik says again. “I won’t ask.”

“I don’t know if I’ll be ready to say it, to talk about it,” Charles suddenly says. “But I can _show_ you? I can do that?”

Shaking as he says it, yet Charles is looking Erik in the eyes, that familiar gaze of fire and steel.

Erik smiles. “If you wish.”

And Charles drops his eyes, points into the flames.

Flickering images: Charles shaking his head _no no no_. Back in the mage tower somehow. Being forced to fight for his life. Face-down on a stone floor, eyebrows pulled tightly together over his closed eyes.

The flames burn a dark, foreboding red along the image’s shoulders: in the fire, in his memories, Charles is bleeding.

When a familiar misshapen face appears, Erik half-turns away, half-closes his eyes.

“Yes, I know,” Charles says, in a voice laced with sadness and strength. “That is not the worst of it. Erik? Open your eyes. This was the dream, this was the heart of it. _Look._ ”

Erik obeys.

The face of the enemy mage is reshaping itself. The scars remain, as do the ugly black lines. The feral grimace that passes for a smile does not change. The rest shifts – and Erik’s heart is gripped with horror as he begins to recognize the new face appearing in the fire.

The face of the man sitting next to him.

It takes him a few tries as he attempts to understand what he’s seeing, and when he speaks, he doesn’t sound like himself at all. He sounds like he’s been screaming, voice scraped raw. “Charles. When the...that...thing collared you, you dreamed that _you_ were him. It.”

Charles nods, once, tightly. “I dreamed that I was fighting his champion, a duel to the death. I looked up to plead for mercy – and I looked into my own face.”

“Is this something that the collar does to its wearers?”

Charles is silent for a very long moment.

When he turns, when Erik is looking into those blue-in-blue eyes again, he already knows what Charles is going to say – and so he says it for him. “You don’t know.”

Charles shakes his head. “The first time I was collared, I – yes, I did hallucinate. I had been hungry for a long time, wasting away for wanting to see Raven. And I can tell you that I wasn’t the only one who suffered from terrible nightmares after being released from the spell. But I do not know if there were others who dreamed _within_ the collar. If there were others who saw visions, as I did.”

“Charles?”

“Yes?”

“Let go.” Erik still has his face turned away from the fire.

And he looks back when there are arms around his shoulders, when he can feel Charles’s forehead resting on his shoulder.

Erik closes his eyes and hangs his head. “Forgive me.”

“What? No, it’s good, what you did was – I should thank you, that was the right thing to do,” is Charles’s response, thick and fierce. “I shouldn’t have kept that to myself. I should have told you, or if not you I should have told someone else. Raven or Jean or Shaw. Maybe that was why I kept dreaming about it, maybe I was supposed to let someone know. Three months of that dream, of that terrifying image, over and over again....”

Erik looks back to the fire and finally, thankfully, there is nothing in it now, nothing but shifting light and shadow, nothing but the familiar glow of the coals.

Soft pressure on his skin, and he looks down, and Charles now has his hand on Erik’s shoulder. “It’s I who should be apologizing, for making you see that. It couldn’t have been – good – to see that face again. I will be very grateful when I stop dreaming about him – and he’d only taken Raven from me. She came back to me, whole and alive. As for you, your loss....”

Erik manages to smile, even though he knows it hurts. “I did say, once, that I knew why you were going to recover from your years in the tower. I’ll say it again. It has to do with your heart, with your feelings, with your kindness. What a marvel that you survived without losing that – and here is the proof, that you can spare such regard for me, even in the face of your own ordeal. Charles?”

“Erik?”

“You’re a good person. You should believe in that.”

He gets a weak little chuckle in response. “Is that something everyone here in this village says? Summers told me that when we were on the march, and he was only the first. That child I was looking after for her mother. The boy whose pet bird had flown away; I couldn’t even help him, but he thanked me and said that anyway. Even Raven has heard it; she says Jean told her, that first week after we brought her here.”

“They are words to live by,” Erik says, “and the truth we all strive for. So I suppose the answer to your question is yes.”

The smile on Charles’s face is laced with uncertainty, but Erik shrugs and gets to his feet, goes to stand once again near his sleeping pallet. It is still dark outside, though he can already faintly discern the beginnings of the distant, brief dawn, if he looks to the east and the towering mountains.

Gust of cold air, and he looks up and the door is swinging softly closed. Sounds of splashing water, Charles muttering about the cold and the snow, and Erik smiles. So be it, then, to begin today much earlier than he normally would, and he gets out his woodworking tools, sits down at the table with a vague idea already forming in the back of his mind.

It is perhaps not surprising that when Erik looks at Charles he always sees the ghostly outline of wings and feathers, and now, he thinks about a bird on a branch and a sweet trill of song.

Erik looks up from his work in the village, sometimes, and when he does his eyes are nearly always drawn to Charles. Charles running errands or playing with the children; sometimes working through his knife forms, and if there are people about while he trains he remains conscientiously empty-handed. When Erik walks past and inspects tack and armor and his soldiers’ various tasks, Charles is often sitting next to his sister or next to Emma – and sometimes he is even seated between both – and the expressions on his face are a delight to watch, the smile that suits his eyes, the laughter that often comes from an embarrassing or silly story.

Erik thinks of a prison, of an open door or window. Of a bird and a flash of blue in startled flight, lost against the sky, and only the distant song left in its wake, a reminder and a memory of freedom.

He blinks, and he comes back to himself, sitting at the table. His hands already turning a piece of dark wood over and over, looking critically at the grain and the little knots. His tools waiting for him, a fresh steaming cup of tea within easy reach.

Up, and Erik sees Charles standing over the fireplace, once again wrapped in his blanket. Charles is nodding to himself; he’s moving as though he’s listening to a song. His fingers are moving over the flames, and the room grows brighter, light and warmth flooding out, filling the hut and lighting up the table.

Erik looks over his shoulder at the window, senses the inexorable dawn in the distance, and he smiles and murmurs, “Thank you – and don’t stop on my account.”

And maybe he thinks he hears Charles laughing, in response; and the song continues, Charles throwing a shadow that sways silently.

///

Two

Erik looks up from his carving, and for a moment he has the urge to put his hands in his hair and attempt to pull. Frustration has never really sat well with him, though this is a frustration of a benign sort, nothing life-threatening. He’s also partly amused by himself, and in the end he thinks he may just be doing both too much and too little at the same time.

The thing in his hands is finally taking shape.

Of course, he has never worked so slowly before, or been so indecisive.

He’s had plenty of practice with carving wood, and he’s found out how to create a bird-shape that is both easy to carve and interesting. It’s one of his favorite things to make, and many of the children in the village have at least one of his carvings. Some of those carvings are even whistles, as he intends for this one to become.

Here are the details under his hands: the shape of the bird’s head, the fine slope leading down to its beak. The light scoring on its body that he intends for its wings. The knot on the bird’s breast, a pleasing spiral of dark wood and darker lines.

There is a particular way of shaping the bird and hollowing it out so that it will emit a pleasing note when used as a whistle; he’ll need to cut out a specific kind of reed to help produce the note he has in mind.

He has already made sure that he can get some of the blue paint that he will need. He’s not planning to paint the whole bird. He just wants to give it blue eyes.

Erik grunts in annoyance and amusement and he takes up one of his chisels, and he’s about to steel himself and get back to work when there is a loud shout of laughter outside and then Charles’s voice, sounding both happy and scandalized: “ _Really!_ Oh, don’t make fun; it is a very serious question, as serious as life and death, and I have to ask on my sister’s behalf, that is how it is correctly done....”

“And I’m laughing because there is really no need for you, or for them, to stand on ceremony. Truly, Charles, haven’t you been listening to Jean?”

When Erik opens the door, he’s greeted with an unlikely sight. Summers’s shoulders shaking with badly contained laughter, Charles laughing even as he bends down to gather another handful of snow to fling at him. White stuff already clinging to Summers’s fur-lined coat and gloves. Beyond them, clutching each other as much for warmth as for support, a happy red flush in their faces: Raven and Azzel.

It is not really surprising to find that those two have been quite inseparable since their unlikely reunion; Erik almost never sees one without the other, save for when Raven decides to cling to her brother’s side instead. And when that happens, Erik knows he only has to look for the nearest group of children to find Azzel – but if he’s not letting the children chase him around, if he’s not carrying one and then another on his shoulders, that means he’s playing at being Emma’s faithful shadow, once again.

Erik laughs to himself, not even knowing what the joke they’re sharing is, and he opens the door as wide as it will go. “Charles, you will have to help me make our visitors comfortable.”

“No need for that,” Summers says, and he squints around doubtfully before he locates the other chair and holds his still-gloved hands out to the blaze. “I am well right here, thank you for asking.”

“I wasn’t concerned about you,” Erik says, not quite under his breath, and he chuckles and Summers is soon joining in.

“Oh, how rude,” Charles laughs, and he’s shooing his sister and her companion onto his pallet before joining them, before letting Raven rest her head on his shoulder. “How could you treat each other so?”

“That is the advantage of having been friends for a long time.”

“Years,” Summers adds. “And we’re not just talking about the soldiering bits. It’s one thing to be friends – it’s another to be soldiers _and_ friends.”

“I’m not saying that’s not true – but I think you’re both touched in the head,” Azzel says, an unrepentant grin on his face, and Raven chuckles playfully, and Erik watches her pinch his arm.

“And will you tell me what brings you all here,” Erik says after a moment, during which he gives up on his work for another night, as well as on his peace and quiet. He puts his tools away, places the little wooden bird back in its safe box.

The expressions on Charles and Raven’s faces go from amused to serious, and even Azzel straightens up abruptly from his slouch.

Erik raises an eyebrow at Summers. “A serious matter, is it? And here I thought you were merely sharing a joke. Explain.”

“The three of them have been looking for the village leaders.”

“On an ordinary day, that would be you and Jean,” Erik says.

“And you are the commander of the companies that are stationed here over the winter; every soldier staying here ultimately answers to you.”

“So?”

“These two,” and Summers motions to Azzel and Raven, “are among those soldiers. In fact, they are among our _best_ soldiers, and they have only been with us for a brief time. Yes? They’re even wearing their ranks on their coats.”

“Which I’ve said is not necessary, not at this time of the year, but I concede the point,” Erik says, and he looks at how Raven and Azzel’s hands are clasped tightly together. “So. You two wish to speak to Jean and to Summers and to me. Knowing you, knowing about your story, I have a feeling I already know what the question is. So tell me, Charles. Why is it your duty to ask?”

Charles starts at the sound of his name, and there are faint red patches on his cheeks, but he smiles and explains anyway. “We have been talking to some of the other families here, and they kept saying that...well, they kept talking about their traditions, of how people would prepare to marry. Many of them said that family must ask for permission on behalf of family.”

Erik watches him as he puts his hand on the back of his head.

“This is not something I know anything about from before I came here,” Charles says, hurrying past the admission, “but I thought it was something we could do, once Raven and Azzel told me about their plans...well, I suppose this is the point where I ask.”

Charles clears his throat and gets to his feet. “On behalf of my sister and of her beloved, I wish to ask your permission for them to marry.”

Erik looks at Summers. “And what did _you_ say?”

Summers merely raises an eyebrow. “Of course we said yes. Is there some objection that we’re not aware of?”

“Admittedly, no,” Erik says. “And so it will be natural for me to say yes, as well; as Summers has just pointed out, I have no objections, and I cannot think that anyone would be fool enough to stand in your way. Not unless you have found other...companions, and that is highly unlikely, because it seems that I cannot now see one of you without seeing the other close by.”

He smiles and nods and the answering smile that appears on Raven’s face transforms her – banishes the scars and the constant lines of vigilance, even if just for a moment – as does the laugh that finally escapes Azzel. He looks younger, suddenly, more relaxed. It is a joy that cannot be contained by the smiles on their faces: a blinding kind of joy, as familiar and welcome as a distant flare of warmth, as beautiful as seeing two souls meeting and saluting each other, as moving as watching two hearts recognizing each other and joining together.

“But if you will not mind me asking,” Erik says, a little more soberly, “I want to know something. Raven, Azzel, why do you wish to be married? You’ve met the other soldiers, and you know that some of them have formed their own arrangements. There are some people here in the village who have not said any formal vows toward their companions, and they face no censure for not having done so. We consider them and theirs as families in any case. As for you, why do you wish to take a step as irrevocable as this?”

As the two on the pallet confer, quiet whispers and Azzel holding Raven’s hand firmly and Raven gesturing with her free hand, Erik glances in Charles’s direction – and Charles is nodding thoughtfully. His hands are clasped behind his back. A familiar pose, one Erik sees almost every day. If something good could be said to have come out of Charles’s weary confinement in the tower, it would be this: he thinks about his decisions and takes a long time over them when he must.

Now, Erik thinks, a little ruefully, if only Charles would also learn to ask others for help when he can’t deal with the question by himself.

Waiting on the others to answer, Erik thinks about the time when _he_ was asked the question. How silly he’d been then, how utterly full of unthinking bravado. What was the point in making such a declaration when he hadn’t even had an idea of what the commitment would mean? He’d been so young then. It had taken him years to learn to temper his impulses, taken him years before he could stop annoying himself and others.

Admittedly, a hard lesson to learn, but one that has stood him in good stead through the years.

Summers catches his eye: the other man is shrugging, the slightest lift of his shoulder.

Erik walks over to him and speaks as quietly as he can. “I think they do have an answer....”

“...But who knows what kind of answer they might believe in. Who knows if they’re even going to make sense to _themselves_.” Summers nods. “I know the feeling.”

“As well you should since I’m the one asking, again. Haven’t we done something like this before?”

Summers chuckles, a little rueful and a little embarrassed. “Yes, we have. Full of fire, weren’t we? And me wanting to protect Jean, telling her to stop fighting because I would fight her battles for her. What a fool I was.”

“That is the least of the words I would use. It’s a wonder she puts up with you at all, Summers.”

Summers laughs quietly, nods fervently. “I tell you true, Erik, I say that to myself every day.”

In the end Erik laughs back and puts his hand on the other man’s shoulder. “If you ever stop wondering, I’ll let her know – and if you survive _that_ , I’ve no doubt she’ll send you to me for a second reminder.”

“Sir.”

Erik looks up from Summers’s grin.

It’s Raven who’s crossing the hut toward him. She stands proudly, and her eyes are clear as she addresses him and Summers. “The answer to your question is this. We wish to be married because we wish to forget about the matter.”

Erik nods thoughtfully. He thinks he knows what the rest of her answer will be. “And after? What happens when the ceremony is done?”

“Then we’ll have time to grow,” is the response from Azzel as he joins Raven. “To grow and to be together, and to learn how to be apart. We want to get married and dispense with the formality, and start building our lives together.”

“A formality.”

“I don’t want anyone else but Azzel,” Raven says, almost under her breath. “I think I’ve made that pretty clear.”

“And I only want Raven,” Azzel says.

Erik looks up when the next voice that he hears belongs to Charles: “I believe them, you know. They’ve already walked through fire and shadow and death for each other.”

“Does this have something to do with your dreams of the future?” Erik asks, genuinely curious. “Or are you just speaking about the battles, about the time in which they had been looking for each other?”

Charles laughs softly. “How well you know me already. The answers are yes and yes.”

Erik watches him walk over and join them, watches as Charles takes Raven’s and Azzel’s hands in each of his own – watches as Charles joins their hands in both of his. He is still looking down, but his voice is clear when he says, “I believe in them, that’s all.”

Raven smiles and suddenly she’s throwing her arms around her brother. “You’re actually going to let us do this.”

“For the hundredth time, dearest, or perhaps I have already lost count, I wonder why you keep asking me. Is there a reason why I should object? I’d have to be deaf and dumb and _dead_ to stand in your way. Haven’t you impressed that on me often enough?

“And you, Azzel,” Charles says in a more serious tone. “You have confided in me, and I believe every word you’ve said. I know how much you love my sister. I’d be honored to know you even if I only knew you from Emma’s stories, or from Raven, at second hand.”

Erik smiles and nods when Charles detaches himself from his sister, holds Azzel’s head gently in his hands, and kisses him on his forehead. “If you do not mind having me for a brother,” Charles says, quietly.

“I would never mind – I really wish you were my brother,” Azzel says, and half-turns to put an arm around Raven’s shoulders, never taking his eyes off Charles.

“Well, you will be, soon enough, won’t you?”

Azzel throws his free arm around Charles’s shoulders with an exuberant whoop.

Summers coughs softly, and gets to his feet. “So, Erik.”

Erik smiles, finally, and he walks over and shakes Azzel’s hand, and Raven’s.

They step back, and they exchange looks, and then they salute him and Summers, fists over hearts.

Summers returns the salute easily and then asks, “When will you say your vows? Midwinter Night? That will give you just enough time to let everyone know about your plans.”

“We’ve thought about that, yes,” Raven laughs. “When was the last time there was a wedding here?”

“Do you know, I don’t rightly remember....”

Erik steps away as they begin to argue about the details, and he goes to sit down next to Charles, who is once again on his pallet, and who is now holding his pillow lightly in his arms. “Are you all right?”

Charles laughs and swipes at his eyes with the back of his hand. “I don’t know,” he says, but he is smiling as he says it, and there is a light dancing in his usually grave blue eyes. “Erik? Is it all right if my feelings are all in a tangle?”

“Over what?” Erik asks.

He’s a little surprised when Charles leans into him, rests his head for a brief moment on his shoulder. Warmth all down Erik’s side before Charles pulls away. “On one hand, I never really had anyone else other than Raven – I am speaking, of course, of the time before meeting you. And on the other...I always knew that this was going to happen. I’d seen it, or the signs leading to it. Here.” Charles taps his temple with two fingers. “One good thing about the dreams at least. I’ve had time to...reconcile myself to the idea.

“And yet there is a part of me that fights against this, like a desperate animal. And I despise myself for it.” Charles looks up, now, and the light in his eyes is gone, and his eyebrows are pulling together in a frown. “I mustn’t think I’m losing her, because I’m not; I should be happy for her, because she has found him.”

Erik looks at Charles’s face. Sadness, annoyance, the sense of someone steeling himself to jump into an icy pond in winter’s heart.

He puts his hand on top of Charles’s head, and nods in sympathy and understanding. “So it’s that way, is it? Then I tell you that there are no differences between us.”

“You had family?”

“Other than my wife, you mean, or my parents? No. But Jean is as good as family to me,” Erik says, nodding thoughtfully as he looks across the room, to Raven perched atop the table and laughing and moving her hands in encouragement as Azzel and Summers engage in an animated conversation. “And, if nothing else, I was the only person Summers could ask for permission to marry her. Then and now, I have always found myself holding a higher rank than either of them.

“We all had to talk about it, in the end: the way we all saw each other, that Summers and Jean were still going to be my companions and my friends even after they had made their promises to each other. That they would continue to serve with me, no matter where the battles took us; that I could continue to rely on them for advice and good counsel.”

A tentative smile on Charles’s face. “That...must have been strange. And interesting. I wonder that I’ve never asked Jean about this before.”

“You’ll want to do that. And when you are done with the serious matters, have Jean tell you about all of the ridiculous things Summers – and, eventually, because he could not stand to be humiliated alone, myself – did. Difficult to get married when you’re on the run, you see, and even worse when you’re on the run because people are trying to kill you.”

In the end, Erik knows he’s got Charles back, because Charles is falling back onto his bed, laughing until the tears are falling from his eyes, laughing so hard that even the others are looking at him and wondering what’s going on. Charles’s voice, hiccupping with amusement over the snatches of words and fragmented sentences. “Impossible...that is a horrifying thought...please don’t tell me that she did and he did...make it stop, it hurts to laugh!”

Summers gets it first. “I know you’re attacking my character again, Erik, but please tell me I can still look people in the eyes when he’s done laughing.”

“What makes you think I told him anything?” Erik asks, finally letting his own grin show on his face. “I only told Charles to ask your wife about how the two of you got ready for your vows.”

“The problem with mages,” Azzel mutters, the corners of his mouth twitching in an almost-smile. “Overly vivid imaginations. Emma’s frightening and all sometimes – a girl that young, knowing all kinds of strange things – but Raven?”

“Yes?” Raven asks, looking like she wants to laugh at the world in general, and at her brother in particular.

“The way Charles laughs now, I wonder if maybe there’s something wrong with him, too.”

“Oh yes,” and Erik looks up when she touches his shoulder, lets him see how she is rolling her eyes. “There’s something wrong with him, all right.”

Something in her tone makes Erik raise an eyebrow at her, makes him think that she’s about to tell the rest of the joke.

And Charles masters himself and sits back up, and he narrows his eyes and points a mocking finger at her. “You just asked for permission to marry him, Raven, are you already trying to frighten Azzel?”

“How could she – ?” Azzel asks, sharply.

“Quiet,” Raven says. “Erik?”

He looks at her steadily. “Yes?”

“Charles is crazy...because of me. I’m afraid I’ve been quite the terrible influence on him. And now you are stuck with the job of putting him back together.”

“All true,” Charles says, mock-gravely, and then he gets to his feet and embraces his sister, and the two of them are laughing and crying on each other’s shoulders.

Erik smiles and nods at Summers. “A good start, don’t you think?”

Summers just laughs. “I hope you can still say that once you realize you’re performing the ceremony, at Midwinter Night, when there hasn’t been a wedding here for a very long time.”

Erik smiles, and shakes his head, and in his mind he’s already bracing himself.

Over the next weeks Erik watches as the hamlet begins to build the great bonfires that have become a tradition and a necessity for the deeps of winter’s darkness. The children’s games become even more boisterous and welcome to watch and listen to: they play around the piles of wood and tinder, always watching out for each other, always ready to heed the adults’ warnings if they step too close to a dangerous patch.

The adults, in turn, take turns looking after the children who prefer quieter pursuits. Erik’s doorstep becomes a favorite stop for people who want to spend the few hours of daylight reading or having a quiet conversation.

He’s playing a string game with Nathan and with one of the younger children, a girl named Julee, and she’s trying to figure out how to take the current web correctly from Erik’s hands when there’s a familiar flash of blue eyes – two pairs of them – in his peripheral vision, and Nathan calls a quiet greeting. “Hello, Emma – hello, Charles.”

Emma waves shyly, her hand startlingly pale against the black jacket that Erik recognizes as something that used to be Azzel’s. Hastily resewn to fit the little girl, he notices that the sleeves have had to be folded back several times so that Emma can have her hands free.

Erik smiles, a little, when he recognizes the black scarf and its crooked stitches. The cloth is wrapped several times around Charles’s neck, looped so that it’s almost covering his mouth.

“Hello,” Charles says, a little muffled, and Erik feels the pressure of his hand on his shoulder – a brief and welcome exchange of roles.

Erik thinks that he would encourage Charles to do that again and again, and not just to him. If only he knew how.

Charles steps into the house and comes back dragging one of the chairs, and as soon as he sits in it Emma clambers up into his lap and puts her arms around his neck. “How’s the game coming along?”

“I’m about to lose,” Erik says, gravely, and Julee giggles but doesn’t look up from her scrutiny of the string. “That is, if she figures this one out.”

“May I?” Charles asks. He radiates a peculiar kind of warmth as he leans closer, looks closely at Erik’s hands.

Erik hears him humming quietly under his breath, watches his fingers moving in small, self-contained arcs.

Finally, he says “Ha” – he sounds self-satisfied, and Erik looks up and Charles is whispering to Emma, who is giggling and sliding off his lap and digging through her pockets for another piece of string. “Do you think we can catch up to them? They’ve been playing for a while, as you can see from their hands.”

“We can try,” Emma says. “Here.” She ties her cord into a loop, offers Charles the first weave, and he smiles as he easily takes the cord off her hands.

“You’re easier to play with than Azzel,” Emma laughs. “He never has any patience for games like this.”

“It was something I passed the time with, when I was younger. I often played the game by myself, thinking up new weaves. Very rarely I was able to have a friend for a diversion like this. I might have asked Raven to play with me, but like your companion, she prefers other games.”

Erik feels his eyebrows rise toward his hairline; he knows Charles’s story, knows that when Charles talks about being a child he is really thinking about either the aunt who sent him into the mountains, or the tender ministrations of the tower, and that he counts the years running and hiding together with Raven as a different and happier time of his life.

He risks a look over his shoulder and Charles is looking back at him, and Erik has never seen a shakier smile or a more tentative one – but Charles is smiling, and it’s a genuine smile, and that could count for a minor victory. Let the past slumber a little longer where it should belong, let the distant memories recede ever farther.

A happy cry tears him back to the present – to Julee, who looks like she’s found _her_ victory. Erik grins fondly at the fierce little frown on her face as she works her fingers through the lattice of his string and pulls at the loops. Her hands are shaking, but in the end she manages to wrestle the string into the next web, and she shows off her laced hands to the group with a laugh. “Erik! Does this mean I win?”

Erik laughs. “That was always as far as I got – yes, little one, you’ve won. Good work.”

Nathan is bending over to examine the intricately woven string and he shakes his head, ruffles Julee’s dark hair. “I concede,” he says, grinning brightly. “It will take me a long time to figure out how to take that off your hands correctly.”

“Thank you,” Julee says. She releases the string and it falls down in a gnarled loop once again – and she bounds over to the other game, and touches Emma’s shoulder. “What about you?”

Emma smiles at her, shows off the string wrapped around her splayed fingers. “Charles is also taking a long time to find his move.”

“Do you think he knows what he’s supposed to do?” Julee asks, giggling. “Or are all adults just _bad_ at playing string games? If that’s the case, I never want to grow up.”

“Please do not distract me, because I am thinking very hard right now,” Charles says with a smile. “And please do not talk about me as if I were not present.”

“Waiting is boring,” Emma says.

“Boring!” Julee adds.

“Well then, if you keep treating me so badly, see if I will help you light bonfires at Midwinter Night. _And_ I’ll hide all of the matches and all of the torches. You’ll all have to spend the coldest night of the year wrapped up, and shivering in the darkness. I wonder how you’ll like that, hm?” Charles pauses and sticks out his tongue at the two girls – and then he reaches up to brace Emma’s hands before he’s moving the string into a new weave, more complicated than the one she had been holding it in.

“I didn’t even know you could do something like that,” Nathan laughs. “Thanks for the lesson, Charles. I’m never going to play _any_ games with you. I’ll stick with these girls, and maybe with Rachel, when she’s old enough. At least I know that I’ll have a chance at winning. And thank you for the show; but I should go and check on her.”

“I will come by to see her later,” Charles says, smiling. “Tell Jean to expect me.”

“All right. Erik,” Nathan says, respectfully, and he puts his hands in his pockets and wanders off in the direction of Summers’s house.

“You are a demon, Charles,” Emma declares, and Erik snorts as his attention is pulled back to the game on his doorstep, watching as her eyebrows pull together into a straight line, as she pouts in concentration. “Is there even a next move? Or have you just made this one up to torment me?”

“That is what you get for teasing me,” Charles counters, and he holds out the intricate loops invitingly. “Come now, weren’t you just saying you were very good at this?”

It’s Emma’s turn to bite her lip. “Quiet.”

The silence drags on for a few more minutes, and then: “Oh! I see it!” Julee suddenly says, and tugs on Emma’s sleeve. “Do you need help?”

“...Yes,” Emma finally says, but not before she blushes a deep crimson.

Erik grins as Julee whispers frantically into the other girl’s ear, as Emma suddenly breaks out into a wide smile and reaches for the string.

“Oh, no!” Charles says, and the exaggerated expression of chagrin on his face finally sets off Erik’s laugh, and he’s soon joined by the two girls. “You’ve found me out!”

“You’re very good at this, Julee,” Erik says.

“It feels like I never have to think about it,” she says, and giggles as Emma drops her string and puts it back in her pocket.

“It’s good exercise for the mind, isn’t it?” Charles says, nodding in agreement. He holds out his hands to her and smiles widely when Julee springs into his lap and cuddles close, bumps the top of her head underneath his chin.

Erik smiles and gets to his feet and steps back into the house, but not before he looks over his shoulder; Charles presses a kiss to the top of Julee’s head before setting her back on her feet.

He’s halfway through setting out the dinner things when there’s a soft rustle, and Emma is coming in to warm her hands at the fire. “Hello,” Erik says. “Were you planning to join us?”

Emma is quiet for a long moment, and then, instead of answering the question, she asks one of her own. “Do you know what I see when you look at him, Erik? It’s as if every time you look at him you always wear the same expression on your face.”

Erik blinks and thinks about it, and wants to hear what she thinks. “And what expression would that be?”

“Not soft,” she says promptly. “Kind. Like you want to walk beside him and sometimes behind him, but not in front of him, because you think you might lose him if you can’t see him.”

There are a thousand words on the tip of Erik’s tongue as he thinks about his response, but in the end he simply nods in agreement. “Is that all?”

“No.”

He puts a jar of dried fruit and nuts on the table. “Help yourself.”

“Thank you,” Emma says, and she nibbles her way daintily through her handful of food before continuing. “You look at him like you’d look at a star, like he was something good and far away, something you’d like to reach for and keep nearby. Something you’d use, because you would need it to light your path, and at the same time something you’d protect, because you think of it as something precious.

“And that confuses me, because Charles sometimes talks to me about you, and he makes wishes about you, but I thought you had already reached an understanding?”

Erik half-falls into the other chair and tries to keep his voice calm. “I wonder how much he has really told you, and how much you have deduced from his words...I’m not surprised he confides in you, little one. I think that I would understand the connection between the two of you, better than most in this place. And I’d surely be a fool if I were to tell either of you to stop. I suppose I’m wondering how much you truly understand, for you may be a mage, and you may know of the future, but you are also very young.”

“My one failing,” Emma says, and Erik looks up sharply, but instead of looking solemn she’s giggling, her free hand over her mouth. “The two of you have been nothing but kind towards me when it comes to talking about what I do, what I know, and my age all at once.”

“Are we, now,” and Erik allows himself to unbend long enough to share in her mirth, to tease her back. “Do you find us overbearing and offensive?”

“Not at all. I’m just glad I can talk to him, and sometimes to you. You seem to understand things more easily, or perhaps it comes out of the experiences that the two of you have had. And you never flinch away from my words.”

Erik looks at Emma when she goes to stand next to him, looks at the smile on her face that is equal parts kind and fond and understanding, and he offers her his rough and callused hand and she takes it in both of hers. After a moment he gives in to the impulse and he brushes a fond kiss against the top of her head – and he laughs softly when she returns the gesture and kisses his cheek.

“Erik? Emma? ...Oh, sorry. I am not interrupting your conversation?” Charles suddenly asks.

Erik looks up and he is standing in the doorway, playing with the ends of his black scarf, and the distant sunset is a faint glow over his shoulder. It throws most of his face into shadow, except for his eyes, nearly glowing now with darker shades of blue; and for his smile, tender where he is looking at the two of them at the table. “Come in, Charles, before it gets colder out there,” Erik says.

“But I promised I would go and visit with Rachel for a few minutes – do you mind waiting? Though of course you probably ought to go ahead and eat....”

“He’ll wait,” Emma pipes up.

Erik looks away, but not quickly enough to hide his smile.

“And I’ll keep him company while you’re gone.”

“That is very kind of you, Emma,” and now Charles is also laughing quietly. “Erik?”

“Go,” he says, “we’ll wait until you get back.”

“Thank you,” and Erik watches as Charles spins smartly around and walks away, and the door swings shut on him.

Erik blinks, and Emma is once again smiling at him. “See?” she says, and she points at him and touches the tip of his nose gently. “You must look in a mirror some time. That look on your face that stays for a long time, your eyes following him almost everywhere – you cannot possibly think he doesn’t know.”

“He does,” and Erik surprises himself with his own honesty. “Truth be told, and you seem to be asking me for all of the true things, what with all of your questions, I think he’s always known.”

“And yet?”

“And yet I do not want to hurry,” Erik says, and he turns away and looks at the fire. “I am content to wait for him, pulled as he is in so many directions right now, pulled toward his sister as he is at this time.”

He thinks back to Charles and to his little confession, on the night Azzel and Raven asked for permission to be married. A smile full of both sadness and self-awareness, a voice full of chagrin and honesty.

“What about Raven?” Emma seems to consider it for a moment, and Erik watches her worry at her sleeves.

“Remember, little one, that Raven and Charles have not been reunited long, that they have not been free and together for many a year, and that now they are standing on the edge of a different kind of separation, one in which they must both acknowledge that they cannot cling merely to each other,” Erik says.

“And yet she is not going away. I don’t understand.”

Erik smiles. “I do not expect you to, and that is because you still do not know many things about people and their relationships. This is a kind of understanding that will only come in time, when you learn about others, when you learn how to be with others.” He thinks, and says, “Perhaps it will help if I gave you an analogy?”

“Please.”

“When Charles found you, you were clinging to Azzel as though there were no one else in the world you could trust.”

“Yes.”

“And now that you are here, now that you are relatively safe in this place, you still seek him out because you consider him someone dear to you. Even now, when the other children call you to join them in their games, when Charles and Eliszabeth and Jean are giving you lessons in helping you manage your ability, it is Azzel you trust with the news of your day, and not your friends or your instructors.”

“Of course.”

“And right now you only need to call Azzel and he will likely find you and speak with you, will stay with you and keep you company if he is not otherwise occupied, and that does not happen often in winter.”

“Yes.”

“Well, perhaps after Midwinter Night you will find that he will begin to say he cannot be with you, because he must be with his wife. He will not be leaving this place unless we do, unless we must be heading out on the march; he will stay here, and you will see him every day, but he will not always be able to respond to you if you call to him, because another has already claimed his attention.”

There is a long moment of silence.

And then Emma says, quietly, “Oh. It’s...it’s like that?”

Erik thinks she may never look as young as she does now, in this moment of realization. There is a certain kind of pain in her eyes, the pain of a child facing separation.

“And Raven is Charles’s sister,” Emma says, tracing out the line of thought with her words and with her hands, “and, and. It’s different, isn’t it? Oh, Erik. It hurts me to think of Azzel going away even though he’s really not leaving, and I am only realizing it now, and Charles...oh, no. Charles has been feeling worse, hasn’t he? Is that the reason why he speaks so gravely sometimes? Is it because of his sister?”

“That is the greater part of it,” Erik says as carefully as he can. He has been helping Charles keep his nightmares secret for a while now, though in the past days the dreams have not beset the other man as frequently. It takes an effort to wrench away from the dark images, to stay on the topic, because this is something he will not share with anyone else. Not unless Charles gives him permission – and Erik believes he may never even ask for it, not with the pain that the images bring to the two of them.

He continues: “And he believes he must smile and assist Raven every step of the way, since that is what family members do.”

“How terrible,” Emma finally says, and she bows her head and suddenly she is crying, quiet little hiccupping sobs. She swipes at her face with the backs of her hands.

“Did you really think, knowing about this, that I would trouble Charles further, little one?” Erik asks, and offers her his sleeve to wipe her tears with. “He knows I am here to support him. He knows he can turn to me. Perhaps he thinks I, too, may leave him. I will do nothing of the sort, you may be sure of that. I intend to stay here, where he can see me and where I can see him – you see, I listen to you – and perhaps by staying with him I can convince him that I have absolutely no intentions of leaving him. Not unless our situations change, not unless that change is forced upon us. And even then I would fight that change.”

Emma’s eyes are wide, and Erik is struck by a sudden thought. “Will you permit me to ask about the future?”

“That depends on your question, even though I understand why you are asking now – you will either ask about Charles or you will ask about the plans for your war on the tower,” Emma says. “I will help you as best as I can, but you know how limited my answers must be.”

“I know that all too well. It was all for the best that you avoided answering me, after all, on that first night when we found you and Azzel.”

“Perhaps,” Emma says. “Ask your question, please.”

Erik thinks about Midwinter Night and its festivities – and more importantly, he thinks about what will come in the days after. Thinks about his plans: dreams of soldiers on the march, swords and shields and among them men and women with blue eyes, attacking a tower wreathed in pain and shadow.

It seems that everyone he knows is running away from that place, everyone he’s ever held important, every one of them carrying some kind of scar or affliction from it. It makes him redouble his resolve. It makes him want to see that cursed place torn down. It makes him want to burn it down, to render stone from stone, and in the end salt the ground where it stood.

It will be an inadequate revenge for how the others were wronged, but it could be a start, though ultimately unsatisfying. Tearing the tower down cannot bring back the dead.

“Emma. How long do I have, how long must we wait, until the storm comes?”

She closes her eyes and breathes, softly, her face turned up to him.

Erik waits, patiently.

“Erik,” she says, and opens her eyes, unearthly blue and nearly luminous. Her voice is high and piercing. “The storm is almost here. Already the winds blow toward you. Sharpen your blades. Sing your song. The storm is almost here.”

He knows what happens next, after she makes dream-pronouncements like this, and he takes Emma’s hands in both of his, holds her steady, as the trance leaves her shaking like a leaf on a breeze. “Do you need to sit down?”

“Yes, thank you,” she says.

Erik makes tea and pushes the cup in her direction, waits for her to take up the cup and warm her hands on it.

“I can understand just about everything I’ve said,” Emma says, gulping down the tea, “except for the part about the song.”

“I don’t sing, except among friends,” Erik says simply, and for a moment his thoughts betray him, and he thinks of the bird whistle intended for Charles – a gift that he has still not yet finished, leaving him wondering what is holding him back. “We will all just have to find out about that together.”

When the door opens and admits Charles with a fine dusting of snow in his hair, Emma calls his name suddenly, her face creasing in lines of concern. Erik watches her fly out of her chair, watches her fuss and look after Charles, watches her bring him food and the rest of her tea and in the end say a hurried goodbye.

“Are you sure you won’t need any help getting back to Azzel?” Charles asks, eyes wide with surprise. “The snow is falling fast.”

“I’ll be fine,” Emma says. And she turns her back on Charles and starts walking back toward Erik.

She says his name, and he nods and suddenly she’s standing right next to him, she’s tugging on his sleeves and he leans down to her level.

He’s very surprised when she reaches up and puts her arms around his neck.

On the other hand, he’s not surprised when she turns her head and whispers, very softly, “Tell him again, so he won’t forget. That’s what you want, yes?”

Erik smiles and puts his hand on her head, presses down gently. “Thank you. I will do so.”

Emma waves goodbye, and closes the door silently behind her.

Erik sits down at Charles’s feet. Pretends not to notice the startled look thrown his way. Says, “I’m here. As always.”

When Charles’s hand touches his shoulder, he shifts toward him, and he hesitates for only a moment before he places his own hand atop Charles’s.

“Erik,” Charles says, and then there is silence.

///

Three

When Erik wakes on the morning of Midwinter Night, he is immediately aware of several things. The sun is shining weakly in an otherwise overcast sky. The fire in the hearth burns brightly, and the smoke carries a faint scent of aromatic herbs. His red shirt – the finest piece of clothing he owns, and for that reason something he does not wear very often – is no longer in the place where he had left it last night.

And he has a headache that is threatening to pound its way out through the back of his head.

Erik groans softly, tries to brace his hands on his pallet so he can try to get up – and there is a shadow falling over him, and blue-in-blue eyes looking down. “Charles,” he whispers, and he suddenly feels as though his tongue has been nailed to the roof of his mouth.

“I did warn you, but none of you wanted to listen,” Charles whispers back. There must be some reason why he is smiling as though he is amused by Erik himself. “You drank too much last night.”

“I did not,” Erik says, a little defensively, and he winces at the fresh surge of pain, like a band being tightened just above his eyes.

The previous night is a complete blur, and he can just about remember the ruddy faces lit by firelight – Summers and Azzel and Armand and Orro and himself, sharing a bottle of good dark brandy. Stories of battle and travel and humorous mishaps. Jean and Charles and Raven and Eliszabeth in a knot off to the side, deep in animated conversation over a basket laden with food.

“You did, actually – all of you, except maybe for Orro. And in the end Jean took the bottle from you and shooed you to bed,” Charles says, and his smile _is_ growing. “We had to call in some of the other soldiers to haul Azzel back to his hut. I’m afraid Emma was rather put out – but that was after she finished laughing, I think.”

Even in his state Erik can hear the affection and laughter in Charles’s voice. It hurts to move the muscles of his face, it hurts to _listen_ to things, but Erik smiles back, anyway, accepting the ribbing.

“Will you need help getting up?” Charles asks.

“Yes,” Erik says.

Once he’s been pushed upright, Erik struggles to his feet and walks outside.

The cold air snaps him back to life, and he breathes gratefully, shaking the cobwebs from his mind.

Today is an important day, for so many reasons.

Erik washes up carefully, hissing at the icy water, and immediately sits down next to the fire once he’s dressed and back inside. There is bread and water and meat waiting for him.

“I can get you something for your head if you wish it,” Charles offers, and Erik slowly turns and looks at him, wide awake on his pallet, hands busy with something familiar.

“No, thank you. I can manage.” And then his mind finally catches up with what he is looking at, and he says, “Charles, what are you doing with my shirt?”

“Mending it,” Charles says, eyes down and focused on his work. “I couldn’t help but look at it last night, after you’d laid it out, and I noticed that there were a few tears along one of the shoulders. I hope you don’t mind that I’ve tried to fix it? I have some small skill with a needle – nothing too fancy, I could never hope to create as your wife did, or the other women in the village, but I do know enough to look neat and presentable.”

Erik squints thoughtfully at him. Even as Charles explains himself his hands are moving, no wasted motions, as economical in his domestic task as he is with his knife or his sword. The needle in his fingers catches the firelight.

“Self-taught?” Erik asks, and he tries to force down another mouthful of food – he needs to recover, and eating will help him, because it’s going to be a full day. “I cannot imagine the tower could be solicitous enough to teach you.”

Charles smiles, and as Erik watches he’s carefully knotting off the thread, and he frees the needle, slips it into the folds of his sleeve. A quick movement with his knife, and he holds the mended shirt up to the light, and the red cloth obscures most of his face.

Finally, Charles folds the shirt and sets it aside; he puts away the needle and thread. “Both are correct,” he says. “I learned a little from my aunt, before she sent me away. I liked to sit by her side and watch her spin wool into thread and into yarn, but I could only learn so much from her. The rest I was taught by a comrade I had in the tower – it was her ability, actually. She could control things like thread, metal wire, human hair; the tower was quite interested in teaching her how to use those items as weapons.

“But she was more interested in using those items to create – are you surprised? She was a weaver before she was taken to the tower.” Charles sighs. “She taught many of us how to keep our appearances neat, how to mend our things and make them last longer. We did not get new things to wear, you see; once a year we would get castoffs, and we would be obliged to make do with them, or make them fit somehow.”

“So she taught you how to make them fit,” Erik says. “I suppose it was also this woman who played string games with you? I would like to be grateful, but I am almost afraid to ask where she is now.”

“Yes, she did. She must still be at the tower,” is the quiet response. “I wonder how she is doing.”

“Well, if destiny wills it, you may soon be able to see her again – and to set her free in the bargain,” Erik says, and he goes to sit next to Charles on the pallet. He takes up the shirt with his hands, looks carefully at the seams. “This is beautiful work, Charles. Thank you.”

“You do have to look nice for today,” Charles laughs. “As for my...my friend, I hope she is well, that is all.”

“For your sake I hope so too.” Erik changes into the shirt, then, and he carefully tucks in the tails and straightens out the cuffs; he spends a few moments smoothing his hands over the cloth. A brief detour to his pallet to retrieve his knives, and he quickly knots them to his belt – and then he holds out his hands. “How do I look,” he asks.

“I’ve never seen you wear that color before,” Charles says after a moment’s thought. “Now I almost wish you would wear red more often.”

“Thank you,” Erik says, and puts his hand on Charles’s shoulder, is looking him right in the eyes as he smiles. “Now, I have something for you. Think of it as a token of my appreciation for your fine work.”

“It’s nothing,” Charles says with a little chuckle. “As I said, there are others who could do far better.”

“I can see the effort you put into it.” As Erik gets to his feet, he blinks in surprise. The headache and the discomfort are gone, and the world seems clearer to his eyes already.

He crosses the hut to the small box where he keeps his woodworking materials. Strange to think that it had taken him such a long time to get started on the little bird that fit neatly into the palm of his hand – only to complete it, in a sudden burst of inspiration, two nights ago. Charles had sheepishly begged off from all of his duties for a day, saying that he wanted to spend time with his sister just before her wedding, and Jean had laughingly shooed him out of her hut.

Erik remembers coming back to their hearth and getting out his tools, lost suddenly in inspiration, and the sun had long since set when he’d finally looked up and the bird-shaped whistle was complete. He remembers putting it to his lips, remembers the reed cool on his skin – and he remembers the bird singing with a high, clear note.

Now he looks at the whistle and smiles, and he covers it with his other hand and returns to Charles. “Will you close your eyes and hold out your hands?”

Charles laughs and blushes and looks away. “Erik, really, the occasion has nothing to do with me, why am I getting a gift?”

“Because I wish you to have one, no more and no less.”

That makes Charles go silent, and Erik smiles.

“Please, Charles.”

“All right,” and Charles does as he’s told: he shuts his eyes and averts his face, holds out his hands.

Erik takes a deep breath, and he opens his hands and lets the bird-shaped whistle fall into Charles’s cupped palms. “You can open your eyes now.”

Erik is looking at Charles as he looks down. “For me, Erik?” He carefully turns the bird over in his hands, holds the wood as though it were a fragile thing. “Is it like the toys you give to the other children? Does it sing?”

“If you make it,” Erik says, and he points out the reed. “It’s a whistle.”

Charles holds the bird with the tips of his fingers as he puts it to his mouth.

Erik watches Charles’s shoulders move as he breathes against the wood – and then Charles puffs out his cheeks and blows, and the bird sings, sweeter and more piercing than the note Erik remembers.

Charles’s eyes are huge and he looks like he’s about to laugh, or cry – but there is suddenly a loud knock on the door, and he almost falls off his pallet in his surprise.

“Charles!” Orro’s voice. “Your sister’s calling for you!”

Erik quells his surprise and forces himself to look away from Charles. “Go,” he says, as gently as he can. He gets to his feet and offers Charles his hand.

“We need to talk,” Charles says, eyes on the floor.

“I know,” Erik says, as gravely as he can. “And we will have time to talk, after this day.”

“I’ll hold you to that promise.”

“I am not going anywhere.”

“Oh, Erik.”

And he looks up. Charles has never said his name like that before. Charles is blushing and Erik turns his head just in time to catch the soft touch of Charles’s mouth against his own.

It’s a kiss as fleeting as a distant breeze – as warming as the summer sun – and Erik comes back to himself just in time to see Charles smile, and pick up the wooden box of sewing supplies, and slip out the door.

He touches his fingers to his mouth, and closes his eyes, and smiles.

And with the memory of the kiss like a glowing beacon in the back of his mind, burning more brightly than the fires he passes in every house, he throws himself into the preparations for the night’s festivities. Children dressed warmly and colorfully hurtle past on various errands. Many of his own soldiers pause in their cheerful, raucous labors to laugh appreciatively at him.

“Erik?”

“Emma,” he says, and he stops on his way to Summers’s hut. He motions to her arms full of evergreen branches. “Do you need help carrying those?”

“No, thank you,” is the polite reply. The green branches are a bright contrast to her deep blue dress. “You look very handsome. Almost as good as Azzel.”

“That is an insult to him.”

“He’d say the same thing.”

“Perhaps,” Erik says. “Where are you taking those?”

“To the square. We are decorating the platform for later.”

“Make it good, then, since we haven’t had a wedding here for so long.”

Emma smiles and nods. “We will. Oh, and Erik?”

“Yes, Emma.”

“What did you do to Charles? I saw him run past to Raven’s and he was smiling almost as widely as she was! And he kept putting his hand in his pocket!”

Erik laughs. “Nothing, little one.”

“I don’t believe you – you’re lying,” but Emma is giggling as she says it. “I’ll ask him, then.”

“Let me know what he tells you.” And Erik is still grinning as he continues on his way.

“Do I even want to know why you’re smiling like that?” is the first question out of Summers’s mouth when Erik walks in. “Life is unfair,” he declares as he continues to get dressed. “And you owe me something for this headache; you must have taken something if you’ve recovered from the brandy so quickly. What is it and why does Jean not have it?”

“I have not taken anything at all,” Erik says, and he looks down at the document on the table. It is a set of marriage lines. “This is beautiful work. Raven and Azzel will like it.”

“I will send your thanks along to Forge, then. He did spend the last three days fretting over the ink and the letters.” There is a laugh, and Summers smiles and lifts Rachel from her crib, and holds her to his heart. “How are the preparations?”

“If you can hear the din out there, you probably know,” and Erik chuckles. “They’re really making the most of it.”

“A good omen for the year to come.”

“And, we hope, for Raven and Azzel, too.”

All too soon the sun falls to its rest, and Jean comes to collect them. “It’s time,” she says as she unbraids her hair and looks in her mirror, smoothes her hands over the elaborately embroidered skirts of her green dress. “Are you both ready?”

“Yes,” Erik says, grinning as he watches Summers go through some boxes in a corner. “Lost something there, have you?”

“I have not.” A flash of gold as Summers finds a blackwood casket with a rose carved into the lid, and opens it. “Jean?”

“Thank you,” she says, and she walks over to him and lets him clasp a necklace made of heavy gold links around her throat. “I haven’t worn this thing in so long.”

“Sometimes I wish there were more reasons for you to wear it,” Summers says, and he lets Jean fuss with the collar of his midnight-blue shirt, and takes the sword she hands him, a sword in a magnificent jeweled scabbard. “It makes you look even more beautiful.”

She laughs and kisses her husband on his cheek, and then motions to Erik, and he obediently gets up and submits to her inspection. “I don’t know why you bother, Jean. We are not the important people tonight. Shouldn’t you be worried about Raven and Azzel?”

“Charles was already fussing enough for a whole village of proud parents,” she says, hiding her smile behind her sleeve. “But for all his words he kept his emotions steady, perhaps for his sister’s sake as much as his own. When I left them he was complaining about the knife concealed in Raven’s boot, and pinning her skirts in place at the same time. He certainly knows what to do with a needle and thread.”

“He says he took lessons in secret from a friend when he was at the tower.” Erik smiles and points at his shirt. “He was sewing this up when I woke.”

Jean squints at the shoulder seams, and she nods, impressed. “He’s a gift, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” Erik and Summers say together.

“Excuse me,” someone says.

Erik puts up a hand to greet the boy standing at the door. “You’re sitting with Rachel again tonight, Nathan?”

“Yes, sir – I volunteered,” Nathan says.

“Thank you, dear,” Jean says as she kisses Nathan’s forehead. “When it’s quieter, you may bring her to me; I won’t have you missing out on the feast. All right?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Nathan smiles, and Erik catches him waving as he and Jean and Summers step out the door.

When the three of them step onto the platform in the center of a sheltered clearing, surrounded by a series of long tables, the faces all around them are illuminated by lanterns. All the places are taken and everyone is smiling, and the buzz of conversation rises and falls with the whispering wind.

“Halfway out of the dark once again,” Erik says, and his words are greeted by a rapt hush. “Here we are again, and no one is more grateful than I that we are all still together. We remember those we have lost and those we have found, and we remember the times of plenty and the times of want. We remember to reach out to each other. We remember to join hands for support, and we remember to let go of pain and grief.”

“Every year, at Midwinter Night, we gather to give thanks,” Jean says, “and tonight we have another reason to be grateful, because tonight we will all be asked to stand witness to two good people as they promise to live their lives for and with each other.”

“Step forward, please, Raven,” Summers says.

A wave of approving whispers sweeps through the crowd as Raven walks up onto the platform. White gown an elegant contrast to her tanned skin. Blue ribbons in her hair and tied around her right wrist. She is holding an unlit candle and an evergreen branch in her hands.

Erik reaches out to her, and she passes him the branch. Her fingers are trembling, just a little, but her eyes are clear and full of happiness as she looks at him.

“You’re sure of this,” he says.

“Charles asked me the same question,” she says. “And you know what my answer is, as he did.”

Erik smiles. “It’s part of the ceremony to ask.”

“Then the answer is yes,” Raven says.

Summers clears his throat and continues. “And Azzel?”

The approving whispers grow into a muted cheer, and Jean hides her smile behind her hand, and waves an admonishing finger at the soldiers clustered near the back of the crowd. Azzel is dressed in black from head to toe, except for the blue ribbons wound around his right hand, except for the white candle and the green branch. It’s hard to read the expression on his face; he looks proud and terrified and elated all at once, and there might be tears in his eyes.

Erik takes the branch from him. “You’re sure of this.”

Azzel is not looking at him when he answers, but Erik doesn’t mind.

“Absolutely,” Azzel says, eyes on Raven. “I’ve never been more certain of anything in my life.”

The next instruction is for the two of them to turn to each other and join hands around the candles, but Summers smiles and shrugs as Raven and Azzel do so on their own, without having to be told. So instead he asks, “Who will stand for the people who will help light their path?”

“I will.”

Charles steps onto the platform. He’s exchanged his customary light-colored shirt for one in dark gray, and it brings out the depths of his blue-in-blue eyes.

Summers says, “I am supposed to tell you to take the candles, but – ”

A small grin, and as Erik watches Charles holds up his hand and snaps his fingers. The quiet click carries in the sudden hush of the clearing. His eyes are blazing with emotion. The flames on the candles burn white and blue and settle down at last with a clear golden-yellow light.

Jean puts her hands on Raven’s and Azzel’s heads. “Who objects to this union?”

Erik thinks everyone must be holding their breath. The silence lasts for a long moment, until a child sneezes and immediately whispers “Sorry!”, quickly followed by a gasp and “Not me!” A wave of amused and relieved laughter.

Raven and Charles are trying to hide their wide smiles as they look at each other.

“No one? Very well,” Jean says, and moves back to Summer’s side.

Erik moves, then, to stand at Raven’s side; he takes her candle and blows it out and puts it aside. A quick pull, and the blue ribbons around her wrist come free, and he ties a new knot, binding Raven and Azzel’s hands together. When he’s done, he says, quietly, “Say your vows, Raven, if you have any to say.”

“I do,” she says, and Erik steps aside.

“I want to be with you always, Azzel,” Raven declares, in a voice that carries around the clearing. “I want to spend the rest of my life by your side. To protect you and to care for you, if you’ll have me.”

“Why would I refuse,” Azzel begins, but he suddenly stops when Jean smiles and holds up her hand.

Erik walks around them, taking Azzel’s candle from him before undoing the knots on his wrist. He repeats the binding on their free hands. When he’s finished, he goes back to stand on Jean’s other side. “Now you can say your vows, Azzel.”

“Why would I refuse?” Azzel’s voice shakes just a little as he continues. “I’ve done many stupid things since meeting you, I’ve put myself and others in danger for you, and believe me, I would risk my life all over again if it meant that I would still be giving you my heart.”

Erik slants a look at Charles, at the tears tracking silently down his cheeks, and says softly, “You can undo their ribbons for them – that’s what the family members do.”

Charles is still for a moment – and then Erik watches as he puts his arms around Raven and Azzel and pulls them close. Charles whispers a few words in his sister’s ear, and she sniffles loudly and kisses his forehead; and then Charles wipes the tears away from Azzel’s face.

And finally Charles lets them both go, undoes the ribbons binding their hands together, and reluctantly steps aside. He walks off the platform, and ends up standing in a pool of shadows, where the lanterns don’t quite illuminate the wistful sadness in his eyes.

Erik almost wants to go down and stand next to him, but the ceremony isn’t over yet – so he silently hands them their marriage lines.

He clears his throat and says the last words, in a quiet voice that carries anyway. “Be married, then, and be together. Be happy.”

Raven and Azzel turn to him with identical smiles.

“Oh, kiss already,” Summers mutters, and puts his arm around a laughing Jean. “Did you want to ask for permission to do that, too? Because you’re not getting it from us.”

Raven turns pale and then a bright red – and then she shrieks for joy and _jumps_ into Azzel’s outstretched arms, and when they kiss the village greets them with a happy roar.

“Azzel!” Emma bounds up onto the platform and throws her arms around her friend’s waist, and he lifts her up and as Erik turns away she is loudly demanding a kiss from Raven.

That is the cue for the rest of the children to come clamoring up around the couple, and Raven’s laughter rises up over their excited shouts and admiring expressions.

The soldiers crowd in after the children and almost bury the bridal pair in their hearty congratulations.

Erik goes to stand behind Charles, puts his hand on his shoulder.

“I’m trying to be happy,” Charles says after a long moment. He turns around and his head is still bowed. His voice hitches on a quiet sob.

“It’s all right,” Erik says. “Family members ought to cry at a wedding, or the wedding means nothing.”

Charles squeaks. “Did _you_ cry?”

Erik deliberately keeps his tone light and teasing. “I usually cry at weddings. I did at mine, at least, and I cried when I witnessed Summers and Jean’s vows. I’d cry now, too, but you seem to be intent on doing that for me, so perhaps I shall let you carry on?”

He knows how Charles’s heart is breaking, and he thinks this might not be the last time they even have this conversation.

And Erik thinks the effort pays off when Charles hiccups once, and he’s looking up, wiping away his tears. “I don’t know whether I should thank you or hit you,” he says, and the smile on his face is a little wan, but it’s a smile nonetheless. “You are a strange man for making jokes like that.”

“That you laugh at my jokes may indicate that you are just as strange as I am, or perhaps even stranger.” Erik grins, then, and brushes a hand against Charles’s shoulder.

Charles bats him away, playfully. “I could take that as a compliment.”

“You should,” Erik says. “And you should also accept the next thing I’m going to say, which is that gray suits you very much.”

The blush returns to Charles’s cheeks. “A gift from Eliszabeth and some of the other soldiers. It was...quite a pleasant surprise.” He covers his smile again. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

The sound of someone clearing her throat. Erik looks over at Jean, who is smiling fondly at them both. “Yes?”

“Time for us to light the bonfires.”

“Ah, yes,” and Erik grins and reaches out to Charles, catches him easily by his fingers. “Come along, then. I rather think you might want to see this.”

Charles smiles, bright and boyish suddenly; he walks proudly at Erik’s side as they cross the clearing. The other families and the soldiers are already gathering around the great heaps of wood and tinder. The children are huddled at a safe distance, clinging excitedly to their families and to each other.

Soft popping sounds follow in their wake and Erik looks over his shoulder, to a growing haze of welcome warmth and fire. Men and women calling encouragement to Charles as he lights the torches in their hands with a thought, with a gesture, with a smile. “Charles?”

“I said I would help,” Charles says, almost laughing, and as Erik strides up to Summers the torch in his friend’s hand sparks aflame of its own accord.

“And now for the last ones,” Charles says, and he holds his hand out to Raven. “The branches you were carrying, dearest?”

“Here – brother,” Azzel says, smiling warmly at him.

“Oh, Azzel – thank you. My brother.” And then Charles ignites the branches by touching them with his fingertips. The scent of sap and evergreen needles rises on the still, cold air.

Erik looks around at all the happy faces and raises his fist overhead – he counts quietly to three – and he snaps his arm down, to happy cheers and the sounds of flames crackling to life. “Happy Midwinter,” he shouts, and the men and women of the village take up the cry as they light the bonfires, and the children laugh and clap their hands. “Halfway out of the dark!”

There is a sudden burst of music and the children are running up to him, reaching for his hands and Erik laughs as he’s drawn into a circle dance, as Julee shouts Charles’s name and the children whirl around the mage, once, and break their line to pull him in.

Erik grins – Charles is almost directly opposite him in the circle – and he threads the steps with a will, leads the children on a wide spiral around the clearing. Laughter and song, the insistent rhythm of drums and clapping hands, and the incredulous smile on Charles’s face, and that sets the tone for the other dancers as they spin past. The music flows and skitters around the clearing, to the roaring fires and the winter stars.

When the children’s circle breaks up Erik catches Jean’s hand and they’re suddenly leading a long line of pairs, and they hop and twirl and bow, advance and retreat, each line a jumble of men and women and even an intrepid child or two. A dance from somewhere near the ocean, Erik thinks, trying to remember the handful of journeys he’d made hence, with his parents and after. Trying to remember who came to the mountains from there. From a place where the sand faded away gently to the sea, wide spaces and footprints tracing out winding patterns.

When it’s time for the lines to move and everyone to change partners there is a sudden burst of laughter down the line, and Emma grins up at him and he takes her hand as she finishes the figure – she twirls once and then bows to him, and he bows back – and then she says, “Look behind us.”

Charles is holding one hand over his mouth, he’s blushing with amusement; he bows as well and offers his free hand to Forge, and everyone around them is smiling.

Erik laughs, too.

Finally, the music changes into another dance, something more complicated involving groups of three dancers, and Erik breaks away at last – he hands Emma over to Julee and Orro and manages to find a seat at a table in the shadows. There is bread and meat and cheese laid out on the table, clean cups and bottles of wine labeled by the families who made them, and he picks a bottle at random and pours himself a cup.

Eliszabeth sails by, arm-in-arm with Armand and John, and he waves at them, nods as she blows him a kiss – a custom from her people.

“I – no, I’ll sit down for now,” comes Charles’s voice. “I really don’t know how to dance, thank you, very kind of you but no.”

Erik pours another cup and pushes it toward Charles as he sits down, a few feet away. “Dancing is thirsty work, and every year I forget and it takes me until Midwinter Night to remember,” he says, chuckling.

He looks up and almost collapses into a full-blown laugh: Charles’s hair is completely disheveled and he’s even redder in the face than he was a moment ago.

“You look like you’ve been working hard, or doing something far more strenuous than just dancing,” Erik teases. “Did someone ask you to chop wood or fetch water for them?”

The answer to that is Charles groaning softly and putting both of his feet up on the bench. “Just – dancing! I don’t even dance at all – the circles I can do, it’s just a matter of keeping my footing, but I don’t understand any of the others! That dance in two lines and that one that Raven was trying to teach me.” He takes the proffered cup and frowns doubtfully into it, and then he takes a cautious sip. In the end he makes a face and pushes the wine away. “Ugh, people drink that?”

Erik laughs and looks around and – there, yes, there is a pitcher of water near the bottles, and he pushes it in Charles’s direction. “Drink this, then,” he says. “Hungry?”

“Very much so,” Charles says as he tears a piece of bread from one of the loaves on the table. “I’m afraid I was feeling my nerves earlier, and I never really got to eat...I think I had breakfast, though I can’t remember what I ate, how strange. I do remember looking for the tea when I woke up, and then I saw your shirt and I sat down to mend it.” That shy smile again. “I think Jean tried to ask me to eat at least once.”

“She said you fussed enough for an entire village,” Erik says with a chuckle, and passes him a bunch of grapes. “Remind me to ask Raven about what you did today.”

“I’m sure she’ll be keen on telling you that herself,” Charles says, and it sounds like half a confession and half a warning, and he manages to hold the serious face for a few more moments before he suddenly bursts out laughing. “Oh, I am a poor excuse for a brother, if it’s my own sister’s wedding day and I am making fun of her.”

“I don’t think she’ll mind,” Erik says, and buries his smile in his wine.

The two of them may be wrapped in shadows, but there are a handful of lanterns bobbing from the tree branches overhead, and they throw a dancing light onto the expressions crossing Charles’s face. He is grave, he is cheerful, he looks down and frowns, he looks up and smiles.

Erik picks at his food and watches as the other man looks out into the crowd of dancers. “Charles.”

“Yes.”

“You are not supposed to pine for someone who is not leaving you.”

“No, you’re right – she’s not leaving, is she? She will still be here, with me, and I will still be able to see her, if I cannot always be able to talk to her.” Charles sighs quietly, and turns back to the table. “Do you know what she told me, just before we set out for the ceremony?”

“What did she tell you?”

“She asked Azzel if they could stay here, and not go away for a short trip, as he had proposed. She wanted to be here, to be near me. Azzel said yes. A passing whim, he’d said. He was not interested in taking her away from here.”

There is a sudden rustle of movement and when Erik looks over to the side, the shadow that is Charles is moving closer to him. “May I?”

“How many times must I tell you, you do not need to ask for permission to sit with me. You may need to ask the others if they mind – but I do not, and I will never mind.”

“I can’t help but ask.”

“I know, Charles, I know.” Erik closes the distance between them, and he says, as Charles leans slightly into him, “Tell me what you are thinking.”

“To tell you the truth, I have no idea.” Charles grimaces, and his hands move restlessly: now on the table, toying with their abandoned cups; now in his lap, opening and closing into fists. His eyes are still darting this way and that, looking for the woman in white, the woman now wearing a crown of evergreen branches in her hair.

The raucous laughter dies away, and the music takes on a quiet lilt, soft whispering notes wrapping around them. Erik looks up, to Summers and Jean walking away from the fires, hand in hand and lost in each other – and there is a sudden warmth around his hand, too.

“Let me, please?” Charles sighs, and his voice is a frail thread.

Erik covers his hand with both of his. “Yes.”

They are silent, together, and Erik blinks when Charles shifts even closer and now their hands are entwined, and they are wrapped in shadows and a silence that seems to hide them and give them permission all at once.

“We did need to talk,” Charles says, finally.

Erik smiles – and this is the smile that he thinks he has reserved for Charles alone, something that means _Be with me_ and _Fly away and be free_ and _I don’t want to hurt you_ all at once – and he turns and touches his lips to the top of Charles’s head. “Here?”

“No, not here.” Charles returns the gesture, cranes up to brush a kiss against the edge of Erik’s eyebrow, and then he gets slowly to his feet. “We – we can walk?”

“All right.” Erik looks around and he stands up, following Charles’s lead, and he feels like he’s moving through deep water – all the things between them, the truth and the words they haven’t been able to say, emotions and pain and the strange story unfolding its wings slowly around them.

As they leave the festivities behind the music fades and gives way to something new: a sweet song, three voices rising in harmony.

“Emma,” Charles says, looking over his shoulder. “Oh, she sounds wonderful – I didn’t know she could sing!”

“It seems that she’s very good at it, almost as good as Anna,” Erik says as he identifies the second voice. He smiles and nods his approval. “It always takes some time before she can be coaxed into singing.”

“Why?”

“She fears open spaces. Bad memories, she says. From wherever it was that she used to stay, before she came here.”

“But this place – ”

“Is nothing _but_ open spaces, I know. Now you understand why you very seldom see her out of doors – she never locks her door, and her friends may see her at any time, but always and only inside. Jean has been trying to help her with her condition. Perhaps after tonight she may have finally succeeded, if Anna is singing so well – it’s been a long time since we’ve heard her voice.” Erik cocks his head and listens for the third voice carefully. “And John. I wonder if the song was his idea.”

“What is the song about?”

“Wedding blessings.” Erik smiles and sings along with the verse: _Love and laughter light your days and warm your hearth and home._

“So you can sing, too?” Charles is a faint form in the starlight and the shadows underneath the great trees. “A man of many talents.”

“I’m trying to imitate my mother the best way I can, but I’m afraid my best...doesn’t quite measure up,” Erik says, and he smiles when that makes Charles chuckle. “And all the songs I know are old-fashioned ones, because I learned them from her.”

Erik follows him up a familiar path, and watches the slope ahead and behind. Charles walks with some difficulty through the packed snow, leaves clear footprints behind him. Small feet in heavy boots, and they climb together to the spot where Charles practices with his knife and his sword and his fire.

Erik takes another step, and another, and then he suddenly looks over his shoulder and he can see his own tracks.

He is walking in and around Charles’s footsteps.

“Charles,” he calls, softly.

“Erik?”

He waits for the other man to look over his shoulder, and he silently points down at his feet.

“What is it?”

“Walking together,” Erik says.

Charles stands on the path above him for a long moment, blue-in-blue eyes fixed on the snow and the forest floor.

In the clearing below, the three voices rise in a final harmony – and then the song ends, and silence falls like a thunderclap.

Erik reaches out to Charles – but he is just out of reach, is too far away to touch.

Charles looks up at last from his contemplation of their footsteps – and he reaches out in turn, and Erik can see the faint tongue of flame dancing in the palm of his hand. He can see the smile on Charles’s face as he says, “Look back down, Erik.”

Erik does.

In the flickering firelight the shadows of their outstretched hands are just barely touching.

“Charles,” Erik says, and it’s a prayer, it’s a declaration, it’s the song the world is singing to him.

A cold breeze whips at Charles’s flame, and it gutters and almost dies out – but Charles closes his hand into a fist and the fire leaps back into life, stronger than before, such that Erik can now feel its heat as Charles comes closer.

And then Charles is placing his fist and its flame into Erik’s upturned palm. “Do you trust me, Erik,” Charles whispers.

“One more thing you will never have to ask of me – yes, Charles, I trust you. Always,” Erik says, just as softly. He moves his fingers to encircle Charles’s wrist, and feels the heat of the flames licking over his skin. Nothing hurts; it is more like the sun in spring, warm and gentle at the same time. “How are you doing that?”

“I do not wish you to be hurt by the flames, and so you are in no danger of being burned – that is all,” Charles says.

“You amaze me,” Erik says quietly, and he steps closer.

Charles merely smiles and turns his face up, eyes fluttering shut, flame burning more brightly than ever.

This close, Charles smells like warmth and clean linen, like blackwood and water running through grass.

Erik closes his eyes and leans down – and then, there’s a soft, sharp gasp for breath.

“There’s someone here,” Charles says, nearly inaudibly, against Erik’s cheek.

“Behind you,” Erik responds.

And his hand is on his knife and he’s stepping smoothly around Charles, he’s calling out a challenge into the night. “Show yourself!”

A weak voice, singing very quietly. _When times are hard may hardness never turn your heart to stone, may you always remember when the shadows fall – you are not alone._ “And so I am not. Would that it were a comfort.” The voice trails off in a quiet sob, and the words “Go away.”

“Let us help you,” Charles says, quietly.

“No one can help me,” the voice responds. And, again: “Please, leave me, and don’t look behind you.”

“What?” Charles asks, and he looks over his shoulder before Erik can stop him, and it’s his turn to gasp. “Jono?”

“Charles,” Erik says, half a warning, and he turns to look at the other man, but there’s a movement in the bushes nearby and Erik tracks that instead, and someone has appeared at the near edge of the clearing.

He hasn’t seen that particular style of braid in years, and he knows he buried all her weapons with her, and yet there she is, with her peculiar sword and its serpentine blade sheathed at her side. Impossible for him to forget that weapon, the weapon that had saved his life over and over again in the years when he was learning to fight.

Equally impossible to forget the woman standing just out of arm’s reach. Even here, in this flickering trickster light, he can see her blue-in-blue eyes, he can see the scar around her neck from when _he_ had saved her life – he’d cut her down from a gallows, he’d caught her as she fell, he’d held her as she gasped weakly and tried to remember how to breathe. Those same hands, cruel and gentle in turns as she taught him how to survive and how to protect himself and others – and always warm on his skin. Her smile, no longer twisted with pain and anger, not the grimace he’d last seen on her face. The smile he remembers sometimes, when he thinks of happy days.

His eyes flicker down her body. There is no trace of the wound that took her life: the long knife glittering below her throat, blood trickling in a thin stream from her mouth. Here, nearly invisible in the rustling shadows, she looks whole and alive – though of course she isn’t; she hasn’t been alive for a long time now – and now she’s almost close enough to touch. Close enough that Erik can see the faint bulge of her belly. The child – she’d been carrying the child almost four months, and they had spent many a quiet moment waiting for the child to move and quicken within her. Memory like a lance as he remembered the joy and the dread of those movements, the two of them sharing one thought: the terrible happiness and responsibility of bringing new life into the world.

A possibility that had been taken away from them, and from him, in the end.

“You,” he says, finally, and he reaches out to her and then just as abruptly takes his hand back.

She smiles sadly and nods, once, and then she raises her hand, points back over Erik’s shoulder.

Erik follows her lead, helpless then and now.

Charles is on his knees in the snow, is holding his hand high to illuminate the scene. “Jono,” he whispers. The lines of grief etched so deeply into his face. Brackets weighted with pain and loneliness, framing his trembling mouth. “Old friend....”

Erik has seen the smile on Charles’s face before, the smile of someone drowning in terrible, inexorable memory. A smile he knows all too well.

The boy stands over Charles, hands frozen in an attitude of reaching out. How can a spirit look on with such fondness and loneliness all at once?

Erik catches his breath and looks away – and his eyes fall upon her once again, and he has nowhere else to look; he closes his eyes and clenches his hands into fists. How can his wife look at him with such acceptance in her face?

“Is this some kind of dream?” Charles is whispering to the shadow wearing the face of his friend. “I – you died in my arms, you were telling me about the messages for your family, messages for the rest of us in the tower.... You were telling me to be strong. You were telling me to get out of your head, you didn’t want me to know what it was like to die.... Oh, my Jono. How am I seeing you here, when I remember you said my name at the last, when I remember closing your eyes....”

“He won’t answer you, not the way you’re expecting anyway. He can’t. And neither will she.”

Erik whirls – out of the corner of his eye he can see the ghost of his wife turning around, a serene expression on her features – and there is a man stepping out from the shelter of an old tree. Erik’s knives are already in his hands; he doesn’t remember drawing them, nor does he remember stepping to cover Charles.

In the light of the flames burning brightly in Charles’s hand, Erik can easily see the last man in the clearing: wild shock of red hair. Face ravaged by hunger and pain and fear. Bruises on every inch of exposed skin, layered thickly in a dark ring around his throat. A thin shirt, ripped in several places.

Blue-in-blue eyes, bloodshot and shadowed with pain.

And the voice that had been singing, just before the spirits appeared in the clearing. “Oh. I didn’t know. You’re a mage too. Even in this light I can see your eyes,” he says, pointing to Charles. “Show me your hands.”

Pain and acceptance and memory and understanding fly like strange wings across the shadow of Charles’s face, and he pushes his sleeves partway up his arms and holds out his hands. He shows the mark that Erik knows all too well. A hateful word, pressed into the bare skin. The scar covering the word, and he briefly remembers seeing Charles for the first time.

Tears tracking down Charles’s cheeks, cutting trails through the mask of ash and blood and dirt. The silent cry of a name frozen on his lips, heedless of the screams of the dying, heedless of his own danger. His hands fruitlessly reaching out for what had just been taken from him.

Charles’s distraught face, and how he had been so utterly oblivious to the wounds and bruises striping him from head to toe – and especially the wide gash on his wrist, crimson painting his pale skin and coloring even the flame that was still clinging to him, even as Jean and Summers were struggling to hold him still.

The images of the past and of now collapse into each other in Erik’s mind, and he is still aware of the ghost of his wife, who is looking at Charles with an expression he can’t read.

Erik jumps, a little, when a hand closes around his wrist. Something real. Something substantial: Charles. He’d know that touch anywhere.

He resheathes the knife in that hand and reaches up to grip Charles’s fingers tightly in his own.

And he looks again at the red-haired man and says, “You got out of the tower.”

“Yes. Good guess. I got out,” the man replies. He raises his hand, and there is that word again. A forbidden word. _Outcast._ “You with the blue eyes. Do I seem familiar to you?”

Charles shakes his head, slowly. “I’m afraid not.”

“Not my face, then. My name. The name they fastened on me, the name I despised. Singer to the dead.” The man grimaces. “Sean of the Shades.”

Erik looks over when Charles responds with a sharp intake of breath.

“So you do know me.”

“I know _of_ you. And now I am glad to know your true name,” Charles says. And then, because somehow his heart has managed to survive the tower, he reaches out to the stranger with the hand that isn’t in Erik’s. “Sean. My name is Charles.”

“Firestarter. Yes. I know you now. Your escape was the talk of the tower for weeks. Been years since the last success.”

There is a soft breath of distant sound and Erik looks up just in time, to what looks like a smile on his wife’s face – and then she is suddenly, simply gone, as though she had never been there to begin with.

“They stay for only a few moments after I stop singing,” Sean says. “The spirits. Do you want them back?”

“No,” Erik says, and he is startled by the vehemence in his own voice.

Charles looks around the clearing, that now holds only the three of them. He whispers his friend’s name again, eyes downcast for a moment – and then he’s looking back up, and his voice is almost back to normal. “How did you get out, Sean?”

“I don’t know. I don’t care. I got out.”

And for some reason that makes Charles laugh – forced, but still a laugh – and he says, “I was taken out without my knowledge or consent, myself – and do you know, I haven’t quite stopped being grateful for it.”

That manages to startle a laugh out of the redhead. It is a brittle sound, but it is a laugh nevertheless. “Oh?”

What is Charles doing? Hasn’t he just been frightened? What were those emotions crossing his face earlier? How can he find it in himself to laugh now?

“Erik,” Charles says.

He clears his throat – and he still sounds uncomfortable when he responds. “Charles.”

“I am not complaining – have I ever complained about the rescue mission?”

He tries to find it in himself to joke back; he has to respond because somehow Charles is making light of the situation, and it is not unwelcome. “Not the mission, no.”

“Good.” He is smiling – he still looks shaken, but that’s Charles looking out with that peculiar strength in his unusual eyes.

Erik squeezes his hand a little more tightly – and then, finally, that familiar line of warmth down his side and Charles is standing at his shoulder.

And he is suddenly, inexplicably grateful.

Charles continues to holds his other hand out to the redhead – his brother-in-arms, his fellow mage. Someone else who got out, just as he did. “You must have been traveling and hiding for a long time. Do you need anything? Food, rest, a place to stay?”

“Storm’s coming,” is the reply, and Charles’s smile falters.

Erik looks at Sean sharply. He remembers Emma and their conversation; he remembers what she said about her dreams of the future. The song and the storm – and his own thoughts of swords and fire and battle.

And he is no mage, he has no true gift for the future – but he has always trusted his instincts, the flash of insight that strikes him now, and he says, gruffly, “Come along. The village welcomes all and asks questions of none.”

“There is no such thing as a safe place, not for folk like your firestarter or me,” Sean says.

Erik opens his mouth to counter him, but it’s Charles who manages to say what’s on his mind.

“I wasn’t looking for one, I had never hoped for one, and yet I found one. Or perhaps it found me. Maybe it can be the same for you.”

///

Four

Erik sighs and scrubs at his eyes, and looks out the window. The smithy is wreathed in shadows. The candle on the battered work table gutters fitfully in the gusting winter breeze.

“We’re never going to be completely ready for anything as mad as this, Erik,” Logan says. His many-times-broken fingers are steepled under his chin. “Not if we had years in which to plan. Not if we had our own company of mages. Not even if we brought the four armies together.”

“Waves against rocks,” Erik says quietly, “waves as red as blood, on rocks made of power and death. Yes.” He drains the last few drops from his cup of wine. “And yet here we are. Making plans to give up our lives and the lives of those we command. Here we are, dreaming our foolish dreams.”

Logan laughs like stones falling down, like lightning shattering a tree. “And all because we want something better, something greater. Because we want what is right. Because maybe peace between humans and mages is an option. I didn’t need the reminder. I see my own fair share of runaways with blue-in-blue eyes. I see children being snatched away. I see men and women being torn to pieces. But thank you anyway.”

“How are the two of you even able to carry on a conversation – much less one like this?” There is a step on the threshold, a flash of red hair. Jean leans on the side of the door, folds her hands across her bosom. “You are both too tired to be doing anything else, and you, Logan, someone was supposed to have come here and poured you into your bed hours ago. Give up for tonight. The humor will soon turn into horror if you keep going.”

Erik gets up and starts to fold the maps away. Interminable lists: men and materiel and magical abilities. Every single entry is a man or a woman, is a soldier or a mage, is someone under his command or Logan’s. Every single name and every single item is a weapon, now.

He knows that every soldier here is a volunteer.

It doesn’t stop him from lying awake at night, wondering about the _rightness_ of what he’s doing.

Sometimes, even the memory of looking into his wife’s blue-in-blue eyes as she lay dying in his arms is not enough to convince him.

Sometimes, even the terrible shadows haunting Charles’s face cannot reassure him.

Logan falls into step behind him as they emerge from the smithy, and he wears the axe on his hip with deadly ease. Erik has never met a more ferocious fighter, and he often thinks he should be grateful this man is on his side. Logan can wield almost every weapon Erik knows, and several he doesn’t even think should rightfully exist – and when he fights with his bare hands Logan can lay a man out flat with a single blow.

The other man disdains strategy and tactics as a rule, has no tact and no respect for anyone or anything, chafes at being in a position of authority, and is the best commander Erik has ever known.

Logan is muttering about the cold and missing out on Midwinter Night and about how tired he is because of Erik’s insistence on speaking with him as soon as he’d arrived.

“Will you be quiet for a moment,” Erik says, but he’s smiling a little, he’s finally allowing himself some amusement. “You have given me a lot to think about, and I need to get started on that thinking.”

“Is he going to be like this again?” Logan’s question is ostensibly directed at Jean. “And here I thought he’d found himself some kind of friend or pet or blue-eyed boy of some kind. Firestarter, Shaw said.”

“Talk about him however you wish, Logan, so long as you show Charles some respect,” is her answer, steel in her voice and her eyes. “He’s no one’s pet and he’s everyone’s friend. Forget that, and you may need to deal with most of the people in our companies – not to mention all of the mages here, _and_ Charles’s sister on top of that.”

Logan laughs, gruff and sincere. “So when am I going to get to meet him?”

“He is in a lesson right now, and we are about to join it.” Jean pauses. “Erik, he’s with Emma, and you might want to brace yourself.”

That brings Erik up short and he swings around to look at the sudden pinch of disapproval in Jean’s scarred face. “What are you talking about.”

Jean simply draws a line across her throat with her index finger.

“He isn’t _forbidden_ from using that spell,” he says abruptly.

“Calm down, Erik,” Jean says. “Please. For his sake, if not for yours.”

He remembers what he’s just said and he thinks he’s never sounded both angry and afraid like that before. “All right,” he says, and he draws in a few deep breaths. “Tell me,” he says, when he feels he’s a little calmer.

“Emma wanted to be taught about the collar, and when I left them she seemed just about to wear him down at last.”

“Can someone tell me what’s going on,” Logan growls.

“You’ve seen mages in your time, Logan,” Erik says. “And when I sent Shaw back to you, I requested that he explain how collaring works on a mage.”

“He did. I remember. Mages turning each other into unwilling puppets, right?”

“You are right. And Charles,” Jean says carefully, “is the only mage we know who can resist it.”

“I understand knowing the spell; Shaw says a mage who was powerful enough was taught it by force. But I thought that meant total obedience at all times, until the collar’s taken away.”

“That was what we knew in the past. Before we rescued Charles and took him in, before we went to destroy the mage who’d abducted his sister,” Erik says. To Jean, he adds, “Why did Emma even think about it?”

“That is the other thing you need to prepare for,” she says, and she grimaces, and Erik looks sharply over his shoulder; her hands are shaking. “Sean is in that lesson with them; he – Erik, he acts as though he’s always waiting for someone to give him orders. It’s almost as if he doesn’t know what it’s like to be out of a collar. There is very nearly a physical scar on him, a thin line around his neck – ”

Erik swears and breaks into a run, and the door crashes open under his impatient fist and –

He skids to a halt right inside the door. The house is in order. The fire roars on the hearth; a gust of cold wind makes the flames shiver. Quiet voices murmuring and then coming to a startled stop. Erik opens his mouth, draws breath to shout.

“Stop, Erik,” Charles says, suddenly. His voice is quiet but it is laced with power. He holds up his hand, palm out. “All of you.” More quietly, he continues, “Emma? Stay with me. You know I won’t ask you to do anything. You know this is only a lesson. _Breathe,_ little one. It’s me. It’s Charles.”

Erik blinks and takes the scene in once again. Tea things laid out on the table, including Jean’s special blend. Only one cup is in use, however, and it’s in Sean’s hands, and there is a patchwork blanket thrown over his shoulders as he sits on Charles’s pallet.

Charles and Emma are sitting next to the fire. One hand at her throat, and the other is gripping Charles’s scarred wrist with such force that her knuckles are showing, bone-white through her skin.

“I don’t know if I can resist it,” Emma whispers after a moment. She is shaking like a leaf in a high breeze. “How do I do that, Charles?”

“Try to do what I did. See it very clearly in your mind.”

“I can’t....”

“Charles,” Erik says. “Stop this.”

“One moment longer, please.”

Erik crosses his arms, apprehensive.

Jean is braced back against the closed door, and Logan is standing protectively next to her.

As they all look on, Emma steps away from Charles. Her hands clench into fists. Her face contorts through pain and concentration and desperation.

Charles whispers, encouragingly. “That’s it, you’re walking the right path, don’t stop – _oh!_ ” He just barely manages to stop himself from falling over backward; his eyes roll back into his head, eyelids fluttering. “Ouch,” he mutters after a moment, and he puts his hand over his heart. “That hurt.”

Erik’s standing over Charles before he even realizes he’s moved. “Charles. Listen to me. Release her already.”

“I can’t do that,” is the reply, and Charles opens his eyes wide. Bright hectic blush rising in his cheeks; his mouth has fallen open in shock and pride and surprise.

“Why not!” Erik nearly shouts.

And Charles smiles. “Emma?”

“I...I broke it. Charles, I broke the collar,” she says, pale with power and accomplishment. “Is...is that even possible?”

“It is now!” And almost immediately Charles claps his hands over his mouth. “Oh, oh dear. This is no shouting matter, is it?”

“It’s not,” and everyone jumps, and Erik looks over his shoulder, to where Sean is running the fingers of one hand over his ravaged throat. “It’s nothing to be happy about, not for you or for her. Not while there’s a tower around.”

Logan begins to swear, quiet and forceful, under his breath, and for once Erik doesn’t have the inclination to tell him to stop.

There is a hand sliding into his, and Erik looks down.

On his feet and seeming to vibrate with amazement, Charles looks torn between happiness and fear. His hands are trembling – flash of his silver cuff, the scar effacing his brand.

Erik starts again when he notices the third object that Charles is holding, the object cupped in the hand he’d placed over his heart: the bird-whistle.

“Erik. Please. Calm down.”

Erik closes his eyes and he sees death in its dark cloak striding toward him again, and he makes an abortive movement to gather Charles close; he just barely manages to stop himself.

Charles is speaking again. “Sean?”

“You know what this means,” the red-haired man rasps out, slurring his words. The sleepy cast of his face. “Weapons, now. The two of you. She wasn’t. Not before. Now both of you are. The collar is the reason the tower exists. The collar is the reason that mage you fought was left alive. I was there when they let him go. I talked to those he’d killed. Experiments. Mages as weapons.” Sean covers a yawn. “The collar is trigger and restraint at the same time. Without the collar, mages go free – and if the mages go free, the tower falls. And there will be no defenses left.”

“Defenses against what?”

“Against the monsters. Against the madness. That which festers beneath the tower.”

There is a soft sob, and Erik blinks and looks up, at the group still near the door. At Jean holding Emma close, at the murderous tension on Logan’s face.

“That which we were gathered for,” Charles says, and now he looks stricken, as well. “I...I had always thought those things were little more than stories. I was confined to the upper storeys of the towers, except when I was thrown into the dark cells.”

“Not stories. Go deeper than the dungeons. All real. All evil,” Sean says. “The dead tell me, when I sing to them. I cannot tell them to stop. I cannot escape the screaming. I hear it all the time. Long gone from the tower, still the mages follow me. Never be alone again. Never know serenity again.”

Worry seizes at Erik’s heart and gnaws with sharp teeth, and he can hear it in his own voice when he says, “The two of you explain yourselves. _Now._ ”

“I...no, I won’t be able to explain it,” Charles says after a long, long beat of fearful silence. “Not with words; I don’t think I can even think about it. But I can do this,” and he points at the flames. Image of a tower and the people within it, people marching away into a deep red void.

Erik blinks, and the red flames writhe into terrifying shapes.

“That one is real,” Logan suddenly says, and Erik peers a little closer. A long snake-like shape, crowned with three heads. “Helped fight it. Went down with both my legs broken. Half a hundred men dead in the attempt.”

“So is that,” Jean whispers. Four legs, a fan-like shape of blades around the neck. “Summers has vivid nightmares about it.”

He recognizes the next shadow – half a bird of prey, half a man-shape, and all teeth; he remembers his father’s voice, screaming: _Run, Erik._ His mother, pale and determined and her hands clumsy on the haft of a spear.

“That which exists in the darkness. Comes out of the depths of the tower. Mages are the first and only line of defense,” Sean says. “None but a collared mage would even have the courage. The stronger the collar, the more powerful the mage, the easier the battle. Only not always.”

And the worry in Erik’s heart draws blood at last, hard enough to almost make his knees buckle in shock, when Charles gasps out loud.

“That mage I – we – fought. He said he was _perfecting_ the collar. The tower wasn’t going to stop him so long as he could keep experimenting with the collar – those people under his command – all the _mages_ in his army!”

Erik thinks back to another image of Charles covered in ash, Charles alone in the center of a storm of war, mouth a tight line of silence. Fire on the battlefield, _Charles’s_ fire, a weapon spiraling out of control.

Erik remembers the mage who’d killed his wife: the mage who yanked the knife out of her chest and plunged it into Erik, her blood dripping red down the blade.

The same mage who’d snatched Raven away from Charles, who’d violated Charles’s heart and tried to tear it and him into pieces.

Horror and fear crowding in on him from all sides. Erik looks around the hut: at Emma shivering and clinging to Jean’s hip, at Logan with his hand on his axe. At Charles, eyes so wide he can see white all around the blue; at Sean, paler than usual and now truly afraid.

It’s up to Erik to calm them all down, and he doesn’t know how it’s possible, because he knows what it’s like to fight beside a mage and he knows what it’s like when the mage is the enemy. But he doesn’t know how to use a mage as a weapon, even if the mage is the only weapon against something far more dangerous. The very idea sickens him.

It takes a long moment, and he doesn’t recognize his own voice when he says, quietly, “Charles.”

“Erik,” is the unsteady reply.

“This changes everything.”

“It does and it doesn’t,” Charles says. “It changes everything and nothing all at once.”

And that is hope, finally, rekindling in Erik’s heart. It’s a painful kind of flame, and it burns as hotly as the answering resolve in Charles’s eyes. “Because there are things that are more important than just our lives.”

“Peace,” Charles whispers. “Freedom. That which is larger than just a human life, or a mage’s.”

“You’re both insane,” Sean mutters, and he topples over, half-asleep on Charles’s pallet. “More than I am, even.”

“I’m with them anyway.”

Erik looks up and raises an eyebrow at Logan. “And here you were always objecting to me and my...crusades.”

“This is the one I’m on,” Logan says, and he looks away and shrugs. “I think we talked about that, just now.”

“Yes, we did, at that.” Erik nods and salutes him: fist over heart.

Next to Erik, Charles is holding out his hand to Emma. “It must be your choice,” he tells her. “We’re marching to war, now. Come with us if you wish. Or stay here, and know you’ll be protected. In return you must help to protect this village, this place of peace.”

Erik watches as Emma pulls away from Jean, and she draws near for a moment, just close enough to touch Charles’s fingers before she steps away, head held high. “I – I want to stay, but I’ll go. I’ll march with you. I’ll help. Any way I can.”

Jean clears her throat, and she says, quietly, “Let me speak to Summers. One of us must go with you, and one must stay here.”

“For Rachel,” Erik says. “I know. I would have you both stay back, for your daughter’s sake, if only it were possible.” He tries to be as gentle as he can when he says, “Tell me of your decision when you reach it.”

“Do you really think you’ll win?” Sean asks, suddenly. His eyes are still closed.

No one answers for a long moment, but Charles is the first to speak, at last. “That is nothing to me. If I had stayed in the tower, I would have been dragged unwillingly into the battle, again and again. But I am here, I am free, and I can choose how and where I make my stand. And that is what matters.”

“Well said,” Erik says, softly.

“Not insane enough to tell people you’re taking your only weapons with you.” With an effort, Sean opens his eyes, and shakes his head sadly.

“That, at least, is something I can do something about,” Charles says, and he leaves Erik’s side again, half-falls gracelessly into one of the chairs at the table. “There are only a few people who know about my ability, and several of them are already here. My sister may have figured part of it out, I do not yet know – but in any case, I will speak with her, and with Azzel, and I will swear them both to secrecy. As for you, Emma, you now understand why I said what I said at the beginning of the lesson.”

“That it was as life and death to you,” Emma says. “Now I know.”

“Thank you.”

“Summers knows,” Jean says quietly.

“Shaw told only me.” Logan says. “Don’t think he’s up to telling anyone else; people don’t like him much.”

“I like him,” Emma says, shyly.

“And so do I,” Charles says.

Erik looks at the smile that passes briefly over Charles’s face, and he nods at him to continue.

“And now I must also swear everyone in this room to secrecy – but it will not be for my sake; I want everyone here to swear to keep Emma’s ability secret,” Charles says, quietly. “That includes you, Sean.”

Erik almost glares when the red-haired man responds with a sleepy, dusty laugh. “No oaths to the living for me,” Sean says. “Oaths to the dead are all I have. But I will keep your secret. I know what will come of it – I will not tell you – but you have my word. Such as it is.”

“I will accept that,” Charles says, and suddenly he sounds weary. “Jean?”

“You did not have to ask,” is the response. “I swear it on my heart and on my life and on my sword; and I will keep it a secret even from my husband if I must.”

“I would never ask that of you, Jean – you must tell him, and you must tell him to swear to me. And Jean – thank you.” And then: “I’ve only just met you, Logan, and already I have to ask you to do something like this.”

“Heard a lot about you from Shaw,” Logan drawls. “He seems to think you’re strange.”

That manages to startle a laugh out of Charles. “He thinks everyone’s strange except for himself.”

“Which is the opposite of the truth,” Erik says, smiling thinly at Charles. “As we all know.”

“Will you swear, then?” Charles asks after a long moment of silence.

“Of course I will,” Logan says. To Emma, he adds, “You’re not the only child I know with blue-in-blue eyes.”

Emma smiles, a little. “I’d like to meet them, maybe in the future – if we survive.”

“I’ll take you back with me to visit. If. That’s a promise,” Logan says.

Charles smiles and beckons Emma over, and she sits down at his feet, and they whisper to each other for a few moments.

When Charles looks up to him, Erik tries to smile, and tries to reassure him. “I will tell you the same thing Jean did. You don’t have to ask me to make that promise; it was done, I made it, as soon as you mentioned it.”

He thinks about the other secrets he’s keeping for Charles, and it only strengthens his resolve. Out loud, he says, “We will have to talk about this again, but not now. Go back to your quarters and get some rest, all of you.”

“When do you want to meet with my officers,” Logan asks.

“In three days. Let them have some time to recover from their journey.”

“Done,” and Logan nods and opens the door. “Everyone who’s leaving, follow me.”

“Take the rest of the tea if you want it, Sean,” Charles says, quietly, and Erik watches as Logan hauls the unresisting redhead to his feet. “If it affects you, let us know.”

When they’re alone, Erik looks down at Charles – and he blinks after a moment and then he smiles, despite the terror still gnawing at his heart.

Charles is slumped down over the table, shoulders rising and falling gently; his arms are folded neatly on the table and his forehead is pillowed in the crook of his elbow. Erik has only taken his eyes off him for a moment or two, but in that short interval the other man has fallen asleep, suddenly and completely. It must be an awkward position to sleep in – and Erik would know. It’s happened to him before.

With a start, Erik notices the lines of fatigue around the mage’s eyes, the tired droop of his shoulders. And not for the first time, Erik finds himself wondering what mages could possibly talk about, because it seems that half the time when Charles is conversing with Sean or with Emma or with Eliszabeth he often comes back vulnerable and quiet. Sometimes he withdraws into himself and sits quietly where he can’t bother anyone, and sometimes he spends the rest of the day following Erik around, tracing circles around him as he goes about his remaining tasks.

Erik sighs and shakes his head, and throws Charles’s cloak over him, as well as the blanket from his pallet, and he touches his forehead to the top of Charles’s head and murmurs, “You’ll always have me. Whatever you ask of me.”

He tries to hold this new and strange vow close to his heart, tries to shelter its tiny flame. Against memory weighing heavy on his heart, against the truth of long and difficult days to come.

“And perhaps someday you will stop asking, because by then you will understand that I will do everything you wish, with a light heart and with willing hands.”

///

Five

“Order,” Summers snaps, and the low buzz of conversation filling the smithy abruptly dies.

“Effective,” Erik drawls into the startled silence. He surveys the table: eleven other men and women. Many of them wear officers’ ranks on their sleeves and on their coats. Scarred faces, two or three with blue-in-blue eyes.

Sitting next to Jean, who is at Erik’s right hand, is a young man who looks exactly like Summers, except for his dark blonde hair and the white scar that pulls the corner of his mouth down into a permanent near-grimace: Alex, Summers’s brother. “A neat trick,” he says, mostly under his breath. “Never worked on me, though.”

“Obviously not,” Summers snaps back, but he’s smiling as he says it, and the tension lightens, a little.

“You have permission to do that whenever you want,” Erik says.

“Even to you?” Summers asks, and next to him, Jean snorts and looks down at her feet in amusement.

Erik shrugs. “Even to me, yes, if you must. Though I trust you will not often find a reason to do so.”

“We’ll see,” Summers says. And then: “Back to the matter at hand. I’m surprised by this question. Why are we talking about _conscripts_ , again? Have we suddenly turned into the tower’s army?”

Several people at the table shrug; Logan makes a derisive sound and props his chin up on his hand. “I’ve been thinking we might have to, no matter how we might abhor the idea. Because you know the tower fights with nothing _but_ conscripts. You can’t tell me there are people in there who joined up of their own free will. Hard to believe that. We’re still picking up runaways, aren’t we? And we look after them and make sure they can get back on their own two feet.

“Not a single one of them has ever asked to be returned to the tower.”

Erik narrows his eyes as Eliszabeth and Charles exchange long, resigned looks, and he clears his throat and says in their direction, “By the way, this discussion includes the two of you; we asked you to be here, and it’s not because it’s warmer to have twelve people here instead of ten. If you have opinions – and I certainly hope that you do – then please speak up. There may never be another group of people in greater need of your unique perspective on this matter.”

A murmur of agreement follows his words, and then Jean adds: “To be blunt about it, we’re not going to make it to the tower, much less back home and _alive_ , without you. Without your knowledge. We need your help.”

Alex mutters, “Hear, hear.”

Eliszabeth opens her mouth, and then shuts it, and then she looks at Charles and shakes her head and leans her forehead on his shoulder; the expression on her face can only be described as imploring.

Their silent conversation goes on for a few more moments and then Charles is sighing, and the sound is loud enough to be heard over the crackling of the smithy’s fire. He gets to his feet and carefully surveys the circle of men and women gathered around the worktable, one of the few places in the village large enough to seat the entire gathering and the only one to be under a roof.

Erik nods, encouragingly, when Charles’s eyes find him.

And Charles sighs and begins. “Some people who are taken to the tower...do choose to stay, even with the way it treats its inmates. For all of its faults, for all of the horrible things it does,” and he bares his wrist, his nearly-obliterated brand, and smiles his apologies around the table, “it is also the one place where the hatred and the fear dissipates, insofar as it _can_ dissipate. The one place where one can learn to tolerate the black looks and the fearful mutterings.

“After all, inside the tower, if one learns to ignore the guards and the scullions and the man with the eyepatch, it can almost be like home. One can immerse oneself in one’s studies. One can be in the company of those who are like oneself. For as long as one’s comrades can survive or remain in the tower.

“It is certainly not an option that can easily be taken by those who find themselves outside, although I do not count and neither does Eliszabeth.”

“Is this man with the eyepatch the leader of the tower?” Orro asks. She is seated about halfway down the table from Erik.

“He says he is,” Charles says, “and he certainly acts as though he were. But he is not one of us.” He points to his own eyes. “Rather call him our jailer. At least, he was mine and Sean’s.”

“Mine, too,” Eliszabeth says quietly. “Keeper of the keys.”

Even seated across the table from her, Erik doesn’t miss how her hand shakes as she places it over her heart. She wears bandages on that arm at all times, wound from wrist to elbow – covering the brand that names her _Outcast_.

Eliszabeth was the first mage they’d managed to rescue from the tower. He still remembers the pure insanity of the mission: the passage they’d used to enter the tower, festering with blood and bones. The tower guards, fighting like beasts even in the choking black of the corridors. Eliszabeth with her hands over her eyes as they battled their way out. Three people, and one of them refusing to fight, against wave after wave of defenders. The pure shock of escaping, and the horror of the great gaping wound across Jean’s face.

How had they gotten out alive and mostly unscathed? How had they survived?

Erik doesn’t know.

He remembers discovering Eliszabeth’s ability. The thoughts that had been predominant in her mind at that moment, and the ringing that was purely within his own mind – a reaction to how _loudly_ she had been sending her thoughts and her feelings. Faces like hers, other men and women with blue-in-blue eyes; the image of the man with the eyepatch. Impossible shadows rearing up, locked in battle with soldiers and mages alike. Appearing again and again in her memories. Fear and terror, books and cells walled in stone.

“I have never known the man with the eyepatch to have a name. He did not bother to know any of ours,” she says with a shaking voice, and Charles nods, eyes pinched closed. “He was only interested in knowing what our abilities are, and so he named us with epithets instead, or called us all the same thing: wild mage.”

“He controls the bulk of the tower’s resources and its defenses, and he is the ultimate master of its armies,” Charles says. “Defeating him will be a crucial step in freeing the mages in the tower – but it is not the final step.”

Erik starts when he realizes that Charles is now openly shivering, despite the body heat of eleven other people and the warmth of the forge.

“Freeing the mages is the easy part. What comes after...what comes after, that’s when people could die, that’s where we face true peril.” He covers his eyes with his hand. “How many of you have fought monsters? Things that should not exist. Creatures that come out of nightmares. Creatures that lay waste to entire towns.”

Orro and Logan and Summers raise their hands.

“I hadn’t thought there were others like me,” a woman with very short brown hair and golden-brown skin says, and puts up her hand as well.

Logan smirks. “I told you and I told you and you wouldn’t listen, would you, Rahne. Not alone. Not in this group.”

Erik tosses Rahne an informal salute, and she drops her eyes and blushes.

“So few,” Charles says, and perhaps a little of the color has come back into his face. “And the tower is the reason why people do not even know that these creatures exist. For a long time now, perhaps even for its entire existence, the tower has been waging war in the shadows against these enemies. Using the most powerful, and only, weapons it has to hand: mages. People like _us_. And so the tower is always searching for new recruits.

“Now you know the fate of every mage who is sent to the tower. We receive an education, we hone our abilities – we are turned into weapons, and we are collared and forced to do battle with enemies that entire armies cannot conquer.

“I no longer know what to feel about the tower. On the one hand, it makes sure that people with these eyes,” and again Charles points to his own, “are hated and feared and shunned, and it spreads the lie that mages are dangerous and unstable, because the tower gains an advantage if it has more inmates.

“An advantage over worse things. The only weapons that can be used against darkness and death.”

Silence once again descends on the smithy. Logan just looks resigned, as he did three nights ago. The others slowly recover, and just as slowly exchange looks of horrified understanding. Summers is now standing over Jean and Alex, his hands on their shoulders; Erik looks away from their conversation of furious, rapid whispers.

Charles has gone back to Eliszabeth’s side, and Erik watches as she takes his hands, as she touches her forehead to his. He watches as Charles’s eyes slide slowly closed.

And then, she whispers to him: _Come here, please?_

 _Eliszabeth,_ Erik thinks back, and he rounds the table and the officers as they begin to talk quietly among themselves. _Do you need my help?_

“I think we both do.” Charles sounds wry and exhausted. “I – that did not sound convincing at all. I may have actually put your officers off the idea of attacking. If I have, and they decide to mutiny, please accept my apologies.”

Erik shakes his head and he touches Eliszabeth’s shoulder, pulls her to her feet and then embraces her. She is still trembling, but seems to have gotten herself under control. “I’ll be fine,” she says, quietly, and she puts her hand on his shoulder and squeezes. “It’s just difficult, remembering what happened when you rescued me.”

“Put it out of your mind immediately. That’s an order.” Erik kisses the top of her head, and nods when Eliszabeth smiles – it is a shaky smile; she still seems like she could cry at any moment, but she looks him right in the eyes, and Erik lets her go easily, watches her sit down next to Summers and Jean.

Jean takes both of Eliszabeth’s hands in one of hers, and places her free hand on Eliszabeth’s dark hair.

Erik sits back down and looks over to where Charles has his hand cupped around a tiny flame. “I wonder how I would have fought,” Charles says softly. “I wonder if I could even have lasted long enough to be thrown into the battles.

“Erik. Do you think I’d have survived?”

“Yes,” Erik says, simply. “You would have fought and lived. You would have survived. Again and again, as many times as you needed.”

“If I fought now and was still standing at the end of it, it would have been because of you.”

Erik raises an eyebrow.

Charles smiles, tentatively, and taps his finger against the pommel of the knife riding his own hip. “You and Summers, anyway. You were patient enough to teach me something about tactics. You taught me how to fight not just with my powers, but with my mind.”

“It was something you already knew,” Erik says. “You just needed someone to guide you.”

“And I would never have had you or him to guide me, if you’d not taken me out of the tower.”

“Believe what you want, Charles. I merely state my observations, which to me are as true as the fact of the sun rising in the east, and of your eyes being blue-in-blue.”

That makes Charles laugh – and Erik thinks, _at last_.

When the discussion starts up around them once again, the officers talk about practical matters. They talk about armor and supplies, the number of healers they can afford to take along and consequently to protect, the types of weapons that could be used in an attack on a stronghold such as the tower. Logan spreads out a map on the table, and everyone chimes in with suggestions for approaching the tower and its defenses, including Eliszabeth.

Erik is soon as absorbed in the discussion as his officers – but he stays by Charles’s side, now, and the flame in the mage’s hand burns with a steady, clear light.

///

Six

Distant winter stars in a sudden, deep night.

The lantern in Erik’s hand burns just brightly enough for him to pick out the path that he has to follow.

Logan’s soldiers are camped in a wide circle just below the village, and he has spent the whole day working among them. Men and women, armor and weapons, horses and boots. A small group of men and women in black cloaks huddled in a circle.

Erik nods to them as he passes them, and one of them raises her hand in response. Fine white hair spilling out of her hood, stark contrast to her youthful face. Not for the first time, Erik wonders if it’s possible to find some kind of material that could be forged into armor for mages – and not for the first time, he wonders if the tower has this knowledge secreted away somewhere.

He wants to protect that gathering. He wants to protect people like Emma and Eliszabeth.

He wants to create armor that would allow Charles to use his flames in battle, and walk away alive and unharmed.

The quiet buzz of soldiers working follows him back to the village. Shadows moving everywhere. The children have long since been sent to bed, but their parents and their friends remain awake. The air all around him hums with readiness, with anticipation.

Erik can almost taste the heavy undercurrent of caution on his tongue, like sharp wine and the smell of hot copper.

Tomorrow they set out for the tower.

Someone is calling his name.

“Summers,” Erik says, and he’s being welcomed into the house, and he leaves his lantern outside the door.

“Erik,” Jean says, and she holds out a hand to him. Rachel is sleeping in the crook of her other arm.

He takes her hand and presses it gently in both of his. “You should be resting. Both of you.”

“We’re still trying to decide which one of us is going,” Summers says as he sits down at his wife’s feet, and holds his hands out to the blaze on the hearth.

“We made a mistake, last time,” Jean says quietly. “One of us should have stayed behind when we went to fight that rebel mage.”

“We would both have died on that battlefield, if Charles hadn’t been there to protect us,” Summers says. “He keeps saying he owes us his life – well, now, we owe him ours, several times over.”

Jean nods. “We’ve been talking about it, and – Erik? Promise me something.”

Erik looks at the two of them, at Jean’s hand tight on Summers’s shoulder, at Summers’s eyes fixed on Rachel’s peaceful face. And he nods, and clenches his hands into fists, because he thinks he knows what he’s being asked to do.

Jean says in a quiet and compelling voice: “Promise me that from now on you’ll make sure one of us always stays behind. We can’t go out together on missions any more.”

“We work very well together in a fight, Jean and I,” Summers says, “but now we’ve Rachel to think of, and neither of us can bear the possibility that she might be left alone in the world, if the two of us went away to war. No matter what happens, one of us has to stay alive for her sake.”

“I can’t stand the thought of being parted from Summers for any amount of time,” Jean says, and there is a suspicious hitch in her voice and in her shoulders, “and neither will he be parted from me – but there is something bigger than just the two of us, now.”

“ _Someone_ more important,” Summers says.

Erik nods and reaches out very carefully to the sleeping Rachel, strokes two fingers over her smooth forehead. He looks up at his friends, at her parents, and says, “I will. Give me any oaths you want, and I will swear them. To both of you, and to Rachel, if I must.”

He watches a tear slide down Jean’s cheek and he smiles and kisses her forehead.

There is a quiet cough at the door. Charles is smiling, apologetically. “I am sorry, I should have come back earlier, but Emma and then Raven were fussing about tomorrow, and I could not get away.”

“No matter – come in, please,” Jean says, swiping furtively at her face. “If nothing else, because I need someone to hold my daughter right now, and that cannot be me or Summers or Erik.”

“Certainly,” and as Erik watches Charles hurries forward and takes Rachel from Jean’s hands.

Rachel wrinkles her nose, once, twice, and her little hands close into fists – but she settles back down nearly instantly, and she gurgles herself back to sleep as Charles rocks her back and forth, as he presses a kiss to her cheek.

Jean nods in approval as Charles moves away to give them some privacy, and then she takes her husband’s hand. “This has to be the most difficult decision we’ve ever had to make.”

Erik smiles. “You still have time to decide. Sleep on it if you must, and come to me in the morning.”

“No,” Summers says. He puts his arm around Jean’s shoulders and his free hand on Erik’s shoulder, and Erik shifts closer to the two of them. “We’re deciding now.”

Jean smiles and kisses Summers’s forehead, and says at last, “It wouldn’t be the first time that you’ve had to leave me behind, beloved.”

Summers doesn’t reply, only pulls her close, and Erik nods and leaves them to themselves.

Crossing the room to Charles, Erik stands protectively at his shoulder, and he says, quietly, “I of course cannot ask you to stay. This is your war as much as it is mine – but even if it weren’t, we would need you there. _I_ need you there.”

“I have to fight if it means there’s a chance for me to help my friends, my fellow mages,” Charles murmurs. “And so, please, never ask me to stay back from a fight. I think that I would refuse you, every time. Save yourself the trouble – don’t ask, never again.”

“That would not be the first time anyone has told me that. Although your words are different from hers.”

Charles casts a sad smile at him over his shoulder. “Are they? I imagined that your wife would have simply gone on – plunged into the heat of the battle, whether you wished her to or not.”

“Yes. It was never a matter of my wishes,” Erik says, and he cracks his own slight smile, self-deprecating and a little wistful. “Rather it was a simpler matter, of being swept up in her wake.”

“And what of now?” Charles turns around and looks up at him.

“Now?” Erik closes his eyes. “You once asked me to approach you as an equal – well, now I understand you, and now that is what I want. I don’t want to lead you into battle or follow you into it. I want to walk and fight and live at your side. I want to be there when you fly and fight and set the world on fire. I want to be the person who helps you carry your secrets and your faults and your burdens. I want to be the person you fly back to; I want to be the person who watches your back in a battle. I want to be the person who catches you if you should fall.”

There is a hand cupping his cheek, and Charles whispering, “Open your eyes.”

“I can’t.” Fear and hope warring for control of his heart, the heart he wants to give to the man standing before him, if only he could find the courage to look.

“Are you afraid of me?” Charles asks.

“Never. Certainly not when I first looked up to you in the night sky over that inn, screaming bloody murder against that mage’s army. I watched you fly, watched you fight – you struck down your enemies without remorse. You helped Summers and Jean and your sister in their own battles. You made sure that those who were not part of the battle remained safe and unhurt.”

“If you’re not afraid of me – then look at me.”

He takes a deep breath, and opens his eyes.

There is a high, hot flush in Charles’s face; a strange light in the depths of his blue-in-blue eyes.

Erik draws a breath and bends down to him, hardly daring – and Charles smiles, suddenly, and Erik kisses him.

The kiss lasts for a fleeting moment. Long enough for Erik to see stars.

Charles laughs, ruefully. “I would ask you to hold me, but.”

Erik looks down at Rachel in his arms.

He doesn’t look away, but he does call, quietly: “Jean. I think you need to come and rescue your daughter.”

Summers’s watery laugh, Jean’s brilliant and relieved smile as she takes Rachel – it all fades away.

Erik stops thinking, and now he simply _exists_.

He holds out his arms and as soon as he touches Charles’s shoulders he gathers him in, close against his heart.

Charles _burns_ beneath his hands, and he cries, quietly, into Erik’s shirt.

Erik doesn’t realize he’s crying, himself, until Charles looks up again and touches his cheek. He is smiling through his tears – and that makes Erik smile back.

The hand that lands on his shoulder makes him jump, and he looks wild-eyed at Summers. _“What?”_

“Excuse me for interrupting,” and Summers grins, and reaches out to ruffle Charles’s hair. “Go home, both of you. Get some rest. Lots to do tomorrow.”

“I’m not sure I want to let him go,” Charles says, confiding, and the smile on his face is equal parts disbelief and joy and something warm that pierces Erik to the heart and to the bone.

“Who said you had to do that?” Summers says, laughing. “Wrap yourself around him if you must, but please, we also must turn in for the night.”

“Yes, all right, we’re leaving,” Erik mutters, and he turns to offer Summers his hand.

Summers takes it in a crushing grip. “It’ll be good to ride out with you again, Erik.”

“I look forward to it, Summers.” And to Jean, Erik adds, “I will need to give you just a few more instructions in the morning. But know now that it will be one less worry for me, if I leave the village in your capable hands.”

“Thank you,” she says, and she, too, wraps Erik’s hand in both of hers. “Be happy,” she adds, glancing in Charles’s direction.

“For however long we might have,” Erik says, and finally they’re walking out the door.

“That was a very strange thing to say,” Charles murmurs as they cross the village back to their hut. “But I think I know why you said it.”

“We ride into battle in the morning,” Erik murmurs back. “And I know, like many who’ve come here, that life and light and love can be lost on the instant, when they take place during a war.”

Inside the hut, Charles raises his free hand and snaps his fingers, and the neatly-laid logs in the fireplace spark and crackle into bright warmth.

Erik looks down helplessly at their still-joined hands, and he leans over and touches his forehead to Charles’s. Says, quietly, “Stay with me.”

“You say that as if you think I wish to let you go,” is Charles’s equally soft response, eyes falling closed.

Erik smiles, hearing the thread of steel in his voice. “I assure you I’ll fight to the last drop of my blood before I release you. To my dying breath. To the last ounce of my strength.”

“Then I’m glad we agree.” Charles squeezes his hand, once.

They settle together in Erik’s pallet.

Charles smiles and huddles in on himself – but he takes Erik’s hand and holds it over his heart, and slowly his breaths even out and deepen into sleep.

Erik kisses the top of his head and curls around him, and follows him down.

In the morning Erik opens his eyes, and knows what he must do next.

He watches as Charles wakes up. For a long moment they smile at each other, and then Erik steels himself and says, “There’s something I need to do before we leave.”

Those blue-in-blue eyes darken knowingly. “She’s here, isn’t she.”

Erik nods. “She has been here all along. Here, in the place where we lived and laughed together. Here, in the place where I loved her.”

“Will you want me to leave you to it?”

That spurs him into action, and he pulls Charles down into a kiss, and murmurs against his mouth, “No. No, I want you to come with me. I want you to see her, and to be there for what I need to do.”

They eat and they dress and they pack, and then they climb up to the clearing that serves the village for a burial ground, hand in hand in the cold daylight. Silence between them, Erik leads Charles straight to the grave marker: simple miniatures of his wife’s sword and knife, dulled blades crossed and struck point-down into a bare patch of earth.

Charles smiles sadly and throws back the hood of his black cloak. He gets down on his knees, sweeps the wisps of fallen snow away. Hands to his mouth, a murmur on the cool air, his blue-in-blue eyes closed. And then he kisses his fingertips and presses them to the hilt of the sword, to the pommel of the knife.

Erik wipes away his tears, and leans over and whispers a name into Charles’s ear.

Charles nods, places his hand on Erik’s armored shoulder, and steps aside. He is far away enough to leave Erik alone at the grave, near enough for Erik to still see him out of the corner of his eye.

Erik has been looking for the right words to say, ever since that unexpected glimpse of his wife on Midwinter Night. How to describe Charles to her? How to explain how his heart feels? How to reconcile their past and his present and a new and unknown future?

In the end, however, he bows his head and murmurs, “Thank you for coming to me, for teaching me and for being with me. How short a time we had together, beloved, and how much I’ve learned from you. Thank you for everything.”

Erik clasps his hands behind his back and thinks of his wife. Her rare and fleeting smile. The distinct way in which she wore her long hair, the colors of a faded sunset. Her hands on his as she taught him her sword forms. The cadence of her voice, rough and low and loving and powerful.

The understanding in her eyes on Midwinter Night.

He thinks about mages and their dreams, and he thinks about his wife and wonders, not for the first time, what she’d seen of her future and of his.

In the end – at last – he turns away, and holds his hand out to Charles, and doesn’t look back.

///

Seven

It’s Erik’s turn to ride the boundaries of the encampment on the third night of the march, and as he surveys the neat lines of tents and horses, as he observes the soldiers at their work, he permits himself a small smile of wonder, of accomplishment, of pride.

There are mistakes, and there are green recruits. The healers are already looking after some of the more inexperienced riders, checking for strained muscles and chafed skin. He has to stop to reassure mages and soldiers alike; there are whispers of caution and worry riding the night breezes, and all he has to offer in the way of reassurance is the truth of his own convictions.

But the camp is in order, and the campfires illuminate determined and hopeful faces, and many of the mages he passes seem intent on their ultimate objectives, whether they bear markings on their wrists or not.

Freedom is just a word, he thinks, as he pauses to watch Summers give a lesson in knife combat to some of the newer soldiers. And it’s a word that’s been used again and again to describe the final outcome of the battle they’re heading into.

But how is it possible to use “freedom” to describe the complicated expression on Jean’s face as she saluted them on their departure from the village? How does such a little word stand up to the lines in Logan’s face as he studies his maps and his papers? What is “freedom” to Emma as Azzel, Rahne, and John teach her to defend herself?

How does a word compare to the strange light that now burns in Charles’s eyes?

As he leads his mount back to the horselines a young woman in ill-assorted armor runs up to him and, with a smile, holds her hand out for the reins. “Good evening, sir,” she says, and even in the dim light he can see her bright golden hair and the multitude of freckles in her face. “I’ll take that for you.”

“Thank you,” Erik says. “What is your name?”

She is a little thing, no taller than Charles, and yet she carries herself proudly, straight-shouldered. “Lyana, sir. One of Alex’s adjutants.”

He returns her brisk salute, and then taps the vambrace strapped loosely onto her right arm. “Is something wrong with your armor? Have it fixed immediately. You will have to wear that correctly – or else you should not wear it at all.”

“I was told to wear these on my arms,” she says, her face falling a little. “It takes some getting used to.”

He motions to the straps hanging from her belt. “Your weapons, Lyana?”

“I’m an archer, sir.”

He smiles in sudden understanding. “I know why you’re not used to those – it’s because you’re not even supposed to be wearing them. Give me your vambraces. If Alex or anyone asks after your armor, tell them to apply to me – or to Summers, who knows a thing or two about bows. Do you have any leather armor you can use to protect your wrists?”

“Yes, in my pack.”

“Wear those instead. As soon as you can find the time to practice with them on, do so.”

She salutes him again. “I will, sir. Thank you.”

He watches her go, watches her feed and water the other horses on the lines, before walking back to his tent.

He hears the raised voices before anything else, and he breaks into a run and he’s at Charles’s side in an instant. “What’s going on here,” he asks, quietly. He accepts the kiss the Charles brushes against his forehead.

“We have...a new addition to the ranks,” Charles says, amused and a little exasperated.

Sitting on the ground at his feet, Emma giggles and doesn’t look up from the string looped around her fingers.

Erik squints at the man in the cloak sitting next to the fire. “I thought you’d given up on fighting, and on the tower? On us?”

“I had.” A familiar hoarse voice, ravaged hands lifting the hood of the cloak away to reveal the tell-tale red hair. “Was called here.”

Erik thinks about that, and then he nods gravely. “May I ask you to refrain from singing while you are here, at the very least? It will be easy for us to explain your abilities to the soldiers – but even so, it will _not_ be easy to calm them down if they should see spirits walking among them. It would be equally bad for them to see their defeated enemies _and_ their departed friends.”

“I can do that,” Sean says, waving his hand. “Been drinking the tea. I took all Jean had.”

“And you’re not showing any reactions to it at all?” The memory of a phantom itch starts up between Erik’s shoulder blades.

“Sleep. Just sleep.” And as if to prove the point, Sean yawns, and he smothers it in his sleeves to no avail, because Emma follows suit and so does Raven, even as she strides up to her brother’s side.

Charles laughs, and with his left arm he pulls his sister in for a quick embrace. “Oh, dearest, you did not have to come to me here. Didn’t you say you were tired? Why aren’t you resting in your tent?”

“Azzel is on watch tonight,” she says, and leans her head on his shoulder. “And I wasn’t interested in being by myself.”

Charles catches Erik’s eye and smiles.

Erik goes to stand on Raven’s other side – and he puts an arm around her, the fingers of that hand quickly skimming over Charles’s shoulder. “You can ask Summers for permission if you want the names on the duty list changed. Would you rather you were on watch together?”

“Oh, no, don’t do that, please,” Raven says, and she reaches for Erik’s free hand, squeezes it gently before letting go. “This way, I can look after him when he gets back from his watch. Until then, though,” and she grimaces, and then she sighs. “This is a little strange to explain, even if I’m among friends, as I am now. I feel incomplete, and I keep thinking that I shouldn’t be, because before coming to the village, before we got away from the tower, I always spent my time in the army by myself. I had people to talk to and to train with – but I preferred my own company, only looking forward to those rare times when I could be with my brother.”

Charles smiles. “But now you’re thinking that you can’t be alone, that you cannot be away from Azzel, not even for a moment.”

“Yes,” she says, and blushes. “As I said, it is a strange thing. Is it because we’ve just been wed?”

“Maybe,” Erik says. “But for my part, I have been very reluctant to leave your brother’s side.”

Emma looks up at that, and pulls a face at Raven – and Raven laughs. “So what am I doing here between the two of you?”

Charles laughs, then, and covers his face with his hands. “Oh, if this was all a plot to tease me, well done.”

“Walked right into that,” Sean says, wryly, and with difficulty he gets to his feet. “Your sister’s fault.”

“I know, and I’m grateful to her for it,” Charles says, and Erik watches him stride to Sean’s side. “Do you have a place to stay?”

“Yes. Been riding with Orro.”

Erik looks over his shoulder and catches Summers’s eye as he strides back through the camp. “A little help, please,” he says.

“So you followed us after all?” Summers asks, kindly, as he steps up to Sean. He doesn’t sound surprised to see him there. “Do not answer, come along, you’re asleep on your feet. Back into a bed you go.”

Erik shakes his head as the two of them walk off. “I really do not know what we are agreeing to, letting him come with us.”

“You will need to tell the camp about him sooner or later,” Charles says, gently, as he sits down on Erik’s left side.

“He frightens me, still,” Emma says as she pockets her piece of string. “My dreams tell me he has to be here. But that does not mean that it is easy to enjoy his company.”

“I see him in mine, too, when I can manage to dream,” Charles says, looking gravely into the fire. “There is still a part he must play when we arrive at the tower.”

“You might be able to see the future, both of you,” Erik says, after a moment, “but we change what will come with every decision we make.”

“True,” Emma says, and gets to her feet. “And so, good night.”

“I’ll go with you,” Raven says, and Erik watches as she bends over Charles, as he leans up for her kiss on his forehead. “I will see you in the morning.”

“And I you,” Charles says. When they are alone, he turns to Erik. “You do not wish to be away from me?”

“I find it difficult to bear the thought,” Erik says.

Charles smiles, and says, “Thank you. I’m glad I’m not alone in this feeling.”

Erik laughs, and takes his hands, presses a kiss over the rough skin of his knuckles. “I have to admit, it will be a little strange once we get used to being around each other. I rather enjoy needing to be next to you.”

“You’ve had experience with it, haven’t you?” Charles asks, easily, and the expression on his face is compounded of curiosity, compassion, and understanding – and beneath, the faint shadow of something Erik finally recognizes as envy.

“I have,” Erik says, carefully. “And I am very, very lucky that I will be allowed to know that feeling again.”

That gets him a quieter laugh, and when he looks in Charles’s eyes the light in them is warm and welcoming, like a fire on a winter’s night.

///

Eight

Breath by breath. Step by step, and onward.

Erik looks over his shoulder. The landing behind them is clear.

The next landing is hidden in the curve of the tower.

A handful of men and women crouch on the steps below him. Some of their faces are familiar. John hefts his spear, muttering to himself. Meggie comes from Logan’s army: a mage with the ability to manipulate stone and earth. Her white hair is in a neat braid, now. Armand watches over her with his war hammer.

She keeps one of her hands on the rough-hewn wall at all times.

At the back of the group, Raven snaps back down from her ready position, lowers her bow, although she does not let go of the nocked arrow. Her eyes meet his and she nods, once.

Erik’s hands hurt from clutching at his sword and his knife. An amateur’s mistake, one he thought he’d long outgrown. He takes a deep breath, and another. He looks down at his white knuckles, and with an effort he forces himself to relax, and resets his grip on sword and knife.

The tower shudders from within and from without. His soldiers and Logan’s are fighting the men and women of the tower’s armies and the mages enclosed within. Eliszabeth is a voice in his head, relaying orders and strategies, sharp and terrified and powerful.

 _I’ve never heard you so clearly,_ he thinks, encouragingly. The words are meant for her alone, even as he leads Raven and their small group further up the stairs.

 _I’ve never been more scared in my life!_ is her response. _I’ve never had to talk to so many people all at once! But it helps, to have you and my other friends. It helps to look up into the sky and see Charles. Do you know what he’s doing now?_

The stairwell ahead fills with smoke and dust and the cries of a fight, and the unmistakable blasting roars of fire and the sudden entrance of a strong wind. Erik permits himself a tight smile, and says, dryly, _I think I can guess. I’ve lost count of the floors and I don’t know which one we just passed, but I think he just blasted a hole through the next. I hope he’s left us enough staircase to proceed with._

 _He has._ Eliszabeth laughs, and fills his mind with flames. Charles’s wings burn bright against the acrid fog of smoke and ash. He is singing as he flies around the tower: snatches of song from the village. _Warmer for the spark, to hold us close, until fear can lose its grip._ A high piercing note, full of power and pride.

And the other mages are calling back to him, calling back with their powers, calling back encouragement.

He seems to know where he is needed in every moment. The amount of power streaming through him is immense, even to Erik’s untrained eye. Weapons aflame, enemy soldiers crumbling to ash.

There is a shriek, a cry of warning, and in his mind’s eye Erik can see the images clearly. Arrows flung into the sky, and Charles twisting away. A wave of his hand – the edge of his wing catches the arrows, reduces them instantly into harmless dust.

 _He’s amazing, isn’t he?_ Eliszabeth says.

 _All of you are,_ Erik says. _Now focus. Remember what you need to do. Guards on the undercroft, and have the mages secure all the portals leading into the base of the tower. The defenses in the tower must hold. You must strengthen it. Take all the men you need. Logan knows what to do._

_They will hold, sir. We’ll do all we can._

And Erik crashes back into his body with a start.

Snug in the pocket sewn into the inside of his shirt, snug against his heart, is a familiar weight.

He remembers standing on the last ridge, with the tower and the village at its feet like a kicked anthill, soldiers running toward and between the formations. He remembers conferring with the leaders of the armies, with the entire complement of mages they’d mustered for the strike on the tower. He remembers Logan turning away to bark out orders to his men.

He remembers the haunted look on Charles’s face, the brisk breeze finally pushing the hood of his cloak off, whipping the loose cloth into his eyes. The impatient motion of the hand with the silver cuff, Charles resettling his hood and smoothing it back onto his shoulders. His free hand resting on the hilt of his sword.

He remembers Charles’s hands closing around his at the last moment, and a last, desperate whisper, said more into his hair than into his ears, and seeming more heartfelt for it.

He remembers looking down at his hand, shock and recognition and something he doesn’t dare name on this battlefield, and the bright spark of blue – his own handiwork – peering up at him.

The tower rumbles – it’s a sound that seems to vibrate through his blades, through his very bones – and Erik touches two fingers to the bird whistle, throws a thought into the wind for the great winged flame that he sees clearly in his mind although Eliszabeth has broken off contact with him, and presses forward once again.

Someone is shouting his name.

“STOP!” Raven screams, and Erik runs down to her. As he passes John he jerks his head upwards, and the other man nods, leads the rest of the group.

“Stay at the landing,” Erik shouts, and John raises his fist in acknowledgment. “Clear the path for us. Meggie, you’re with him.”

“Yes, sir,” she calls.

“Erik!”

Raven curses, once, and she drops her arrow back into the quiver at her waist.

There are three figures running up to her. She holds her hand out to the girl in white, to the redhead, to the man in black a step behind the other two. “Azzel, what’s going on?”

“I have to be here,” Emma says, winded and gasping. “I finally understood my dreams. Sean and I – _we’re_ the song. You need us here, Erik.”

Erik stares at her bloodstained hands, and asks the first question that comes to mind. “How did you kill him?”

“Her,” is the clipped response. “She knocked Sean down, and she was going to run him through with her swords while he struggled to get up. I ran around her, stabbed her in the knee and the back of the leg. She fell down. I ran around her and put my knife in her throat.”

Raven whistles, softly, and grins at her husband. “That was something you taught her.”

“Naturally,” Azzel says, and he isn’t smiling, but he sounds proud all the same. “Apt pupil.” He puts his hand on Emma’s shoulder. Blood and dirt on her white dress, on his black sleeves. “A little careless. I won’t always be there to watch your back. Remember to guard.”

“Yes,” Emma says.

Sean points a finger at his throat. “Sing when you need it. I’ll help.”

Erik shakes his head, heedless of the worry seizing at him like thorns and claws. “I will simply have to trust that you know what you need to do. That you’ll keep your wits around you. Your officers or your companions have explained the plans to you. I am not climbing this tower for my health.”

“It seems like the tower’s more a _threat_ to your health,” Azzel interjects, and he manages to look affronted, even over the screaming and the sounds of the fight.

“It is that,” Erik says, quietly. “To mine and everyone’s.”

He looks down as Emma slides her hand into his. “I am a poor substitute for Charles,” she says, quietly and earnestly. “But let me help.”

He stoops and kisses the top of her head. “Never, never think of yourself as poor or as a substitute. For what you do is valuable. You are _needed_. And if you don’t want to believe me – ask Charles. Ask anyone in the village. Once we get back.”

“Once we get back.” She gives him a shaky smile – and then someone is shrieking below them, and Raven darts down. She stands protectively over Azzel. Every line of her is ready for the fight.

“Go,” she hisses over her shoulder. “We’ll deal with this, follow as soon as we can.”

Erik nods, and sends a message to Eliszabeth. _Sean and Emma are with me. Raven and Azzel are guarding our backs. We’re all still all right for now._

 _I’m telling Charles now,_ is her reply. There is a brief image of Eliszabeth covering her smile. _I’ll let him scold you when you’re actually there to hear it. This is actually funny._

_I’m glad you can laugh in the midst of this._

_If I can’t laugh here, what’s the good in living? It helps me remember what I’m fighting for._

_Good girl._

Erik runs up the stairs and passes a slit of a window, just wide enough for someone to perhaps point out of, or aim a weapon from. He motions Sean and Emma ahead – he sees Armand offer a hand to the redhead – and he dares a glance outside. A dizzying vantage point over the battle raging far below.

A brief glimpse of flame.

“We’re almost there!” Up ahead, John is waving his arm, chivvying the others up the stairs. “You, too, Erik! Hurry up!”

Erik nods, and he bellows, “Raven! Azzel! _Come!_ ”

“On the way!” Azzel yells back.

Erik sprints past his soldiers, who flatten themselves against the wall to let him pass, and he and John confer in whispers once the top of the stairs is in sight. “Charles and the other mages have described those doors to me,” Erik says as he sheathes his sword and his knife.

John peers at the doors. Solid make. From this location they appear seamless and impassable. “Did they tell you how to open it?”

“Yes.” Erik closes his eyes and tries to remember the flame flickering in Charles’s upturned hand. The shadow of the doors. Charles’s quiet explanation, the two of them puzzling out a solution together. Those one or two other mages in his army and Logan’s who knew about the doors, contributing ideas and suggestions for defeating them.

Now he is going to put all that knowledge to the test.

He nods, at last, to his soldiers, and to Azzel and Raven as they finally rejoin the group. “Defensive formation here. Keep Emma and Sean safe at all times. Possibly one of you could watch my back, as well.”

“Let me do that, sir,” Meggie says. “I don’t need any guarding, and you _will_ need a mage with you, here, in a place like this.”

Erik watches her step to his side, watches as she snaps her hands out and up. In response, the stone beneath them glows and rumbles softly. Cracks appear in a circular pattern around her feet, expanding to include him. It _hums_ , and the smile on Meggie’s face as she looks up at the doors is familiar: control, power, ability; the easy knowledge of doing something needed and familiar and _one’s own_.

He permits himself a tight little smile. Whereas now he has to perform an important task, not knowing how well he’ll do unless he manages to walk out of it alive. And not just him, but the men and women protecting him, as well.

He takes a deep breath, and steps up to the doors, and reaches out to the circular indentation at chest height.

_Stop!_

Erik freezes before he can touch the portal, and he calls out, in a voice blank with shock. “Eliszabeth – _Charles?_ What’s happening?”

 _Don’t ask questions!_ Her voice in his head sounds broken and frightened. _Get everyone to safety! Something’s wrong...._

_Tell me what’s going on! Eliszabeth!_

The silence that answers him is like a strike to the heart.

He calls out again.

This time there is no answer.

“Sir,” Meggie says suddenly, quietly.

One glance is all it takes, and he’s reaching out automatically to her. Deep lines of pain in her face where there was a smile only a few moments ago. Tears in the corners of her eyes. The circle at her feet pulses, slow and weak, shadow and light fighting for dominance.

“No, don’t,” she says. “Don’t worry about me. Look after the other two. I’m...I’m done for, here, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to go down without a struggle.”

_“What are you talking about.”_

“Pain,” is the whispered reply. She’s still holding out her hands – and now they are shaking. “Whoever is in there – whatever they’re hiding behind those doors – they’re resorting to their last attacks.”

Despite the stubborn set of her mouth Erik moves to her side, lifts her into his arms. “Let go,” he snaps, quietly. “Release. That is an _order_ , Meggie.”

She shakes her head, mute and pale.

Dread clenches around Erik’s heart for the mages in his army and Logan’s; for the men and women securing the tower on the ground and below it. He realizes that now he can no longer hear Charles singing.

Who else is affected by this final strike? Are the mages fighting for the tower in pain, as well?

How could the tower do this?

 _Easily,_ whispers a traitorous voice in his head. _As easily as they’d broken Sean and Charles, and all the others it lays its hands on. The tower exists only to reduce mages to wasted wrecks of their true selves. You know what_ she _would have chosen, if she had been forced to choose between the tower and her death._

He sees, again, the image of a hangman’s noose.

He turns his back on the doors, tries to shift Meggie into a more comfortable position in his arms, and hurries back to his men. Emma is weeping and shivering in Sean’s arms; he curls protectively around her, silent and suddenly old and distant.

He meets John’s eyes, and Armand’s and Raven’s and Azzel’s.

Raven looks afraid for him, and for the three mages in their care, and for her brother.

Erik speaks mostly for her benefit, though he’s not sure how much he believes in it. It’s difficult to talk around the dull pain in the back of his mind, around the worry and the fear for Charles’s sake. “The only thing we can do right now is believe in our friends, in ourselves.”

There is a loud, creaking sound.

“No! _You won’t hurt them!_ ”

It takes him a moment to register Meggie’s hoarse shout – and then she’s half-struggling with him, she’s extending her hands over his shoulders. The walls shudder and Erik cries out, sharp edges of broken rock slashing into his cheek.

“Everyone down,” Raven shouts, “and cover your eyes!”

“Sir – Erik,” someone says, and he looks down, and Meggie whispers, “I’m sorry – tell them how I died, all right?”

He curses, once, and shakes her roughly. “You’re not going to die, Meggie. We’re going to get out of her, and we’re going to get you back home.”

“No, I’m not. I’m already dead.”

The stones tremble beneath his feet, and now Erik can feel the strength pouring through the girl in his arms. Her face is a mask of dust and determination, and tears cutting through the grime.

“Let me go – let me stand,” Meggie says. “Let me do what I came here for.” And she half-falls out of his hold. She cries out as her feet touch the broken stones – she staggers away from Erik, toward the doors.

“Stop!”

Meggie looks over her shoulder, and tries to smile. She’s speaking, but her words are lost among the falling rocks. She is the center of the sudden storm, mistress and subject of her own powers. Her hands glow a faint white as she finally presses them to the great, unmoving doors.

Sean is whispering harshly behind him. “Sing you back. _Yes._ I must. I will remember. One thing I’m good for.” And then: “I don’t want you to go.”

“Meggie! Don’t do this!” Erik shouts, pleading and angry, as she pushes on the doors. Cracks in the solid material under her hands, and the doors are letting out some kind of unearthly moan, resisting her efforts.

She _lifts_ off the floor, and screams.

The doors shriek back, and Erik falls to his knees in pain, and he’s not the only one.

The walls are collapsing, outwards, and he can see the dull sky.

Meggie screams again, and this time Erik can just barely make out what she’s saying.

_“Yield!”_

The doors groan, and then – cracks spiderwebbing across them from Meggie’s hands, growing and spreading until the doors are completely alight – and then, suddenly, they are gone, as though they had never been there.

All that is left is an area roughly the size and shape of a woman. A pair of bloody handprints.

Meggie is gone.

Erik clenches his teeth against the tears, against the denial, against the pain – and he draws his weapons. “Get up,” he growls over his shoulder. “She gave her life to get us past the doors. _Honor her._

“On your feet! _To me!_ ”

A hand on his shoulder; Azzel grins and drops into a crouch, sword at the ready.

On his other side, Raven nocks an arrow and raises her bow in one smooth motion.

“Ready to move when you are,” John murmurs. “Armand, look after the mages.”

“For Meggie,” Erik says, at last, and darts forward, past the remains of the doors.

_For Charles._

_For you. The last thing I can do for you._

He’s outside, suddenly. The blasted sky above him, and the sounds of the battle, far below.

A small courtyard. A man with an eyepatch. Fear in the faces of the half-dozen mages surrounding him. All of them are wrapped in heavy black cloaks.

Erik spares a glance, a thought, for the memory of flames on the wind – and then he raises his sword and points it at the other man. At the man who controls the tower. “Keeper of the keys,” Erik shouts. “I name you tyrant and jailor. I know your secrets. I know you have the people around you under your control, held in those damned collars. I know how you break people with fear and with the creatures swarming in the depths of this forsaken place. _Enough_ with this madness.

“Throw down your weapons. Yield to justice. Free your prisoners.

“Or fight.”

There is silence, and the moan of the wind, and then: a harsh rasp of laughter, low and mocking. “You are hardly the first to storm this citadel,” the man with the eyepatch growls. “Though you _are_ the first to make it past that second set of doors. I imagine that did not come without paying a high price.”

Erik grits his teeth, and he looks over his shoulder. “Do not answer.”

The other man merely smirks, and holds out his hands. “Oh, I can see you’ve brought me back one of my runaways. Singer to the dead. How long it’s been since I last heard your voice.”

“Don’t call him that.”

Erik blanches, and it takes him an effort to control his voice. He can’t give away anything. Not here. Not now. And he says her name over his shoulder, quiet and cautioning. “Emma.”

“And who are you?” the man with the eyepatch asks. “Little girl with blue-in-blue eyes. You’ll come here eventually. And I will know what you can do, and it will please me to turn you into a weapon, to wrap power around your heart – but only if you’re strong enough.”

Erik glances back, and he can see Emma. She is ablaze: her eyes shining with her fury and her sincerity. Her hair like a streaming silver banner on the wind. Reflections of a dull sky in the blade that seems as long as her own arm.

Erik watches her open her mouth and he turns around partway, and points to his own throat.

It’s her turn to go pale.

“You’re afraid of me,” Sean says, suddenly. He is on his knees, now, next to Emma. “So surprise me. Why defend me?”

When Emma answers, it’s in a whisper, delivered while she’s looking down at her feet. “You’re still one of us.” She is pointedly ignoring the man at the other end of the courtyard. “You’re a friend. We march together. We fight together. _We have to be free together._ ”

Despite the terror, despite the fear, Erik smiles. “Back into the ranks with the two of you, and quiet, please. Remember what you were told when you set out with us.” He glances again at his soldiers. “If you think I’m going to give up – give any of you up. If you think I’m going to stop now – _just watch me._ ”

He’s met with more mocking laughter from his opponent. “Such hopeful words, for such unruly weapons. Sure and you can defend them. Sure and you can fight me, and you might even win. But do you really understand why the tower exists? Destroy this, destroy _me_ , and nothing will be left to protect you against....” And the man with the eyepatch points to the ground, unfathomable distance to the foot of the tower.

“I think I’ve heard this speech before,” Raven mutters. “And I liked it better the first time.”

“Wrong,” Azzel says. “It was just as bad then. I was there, standing over you.”

She manages to dredge up a smile that is mostly a grimace.

“This one’s worse,” Erik says, only mostly under his breath, and then he raises his voice again. “Because not a word of it is true.” He bares his teeth at his enemy. “Too many people have been destroyed because of the secrets in this cursed place. Too many lives lost. Enough. Give up. Give over.

“Break all the collars. Set the mages free.”

The man with the eyepatch laughs.

Erik tenses, ready to spring forward into the battle, or back to protect the others.

In the charged silence, someone coughs, and draws a deep breath.

“Sean, no!”

Erik spins back around. Emma with her hand out – but Sean is shaking himself free, is pressing a kiss to her knuckles, before he walks forward with his head held high. An unearthly light burns in his eyes, and there are spots of red high in his cheeks.

Sean is smiling.

And he stops just a few feet forward of Erik’s position, holds his hands out to the sides.

Erik is suddenly reminded of Meggie, and of his wife, and of Charles.

And he recognizes _pride_ in Sean’s eyes as the red-haired man looks over his shoulder and smiles. “You know what I’m about to do.”

Erik forces his answer past the recognition wrapping around his throat. “Yes.”

“Everyone brace yourselves,” Sean says.

Erik looks down as small hands catch at his sword-belt, and he places his wrist fleetingly against Emma’s head. “He’ll be fine,” he says, eyes riveted on the red-haired man. “We have to believe in him.”

The man in the eyepatch sneers. “You’ve forgotten I am not affected by your little hymns.”

Sean laughs. “Who said this was for _you_?”

And he begins to sing.

Familiar shapes and shadows. A glimpse of a serpentine blade; a flash of a long white braid; a boy who’d looked so kindly at Charles on Midwinter Night.

Erik grimaces and steels himself to look in the eyes of the ghosts. How many of them Sean must be calling now, just from this battlefield alone.

A hand on his shoulder, and Erik opens his eyes, to John looking around him. Surprise written in every line of his face. “I – did you know he could do this?”

“I knew what he could do,” Erik says, “before I knew his name.”

“Erik,” Emma whispers. “None of the ghosts are looking at us.”

“That was what I was about to say,” John says. “I was there when you explained it to us. I was waiting to see my...my friend’s face. But there he is,” and he points to the shadow of a broad-shouldered man hefting a double-bladed axe in his hand. “He appeared next to me, and then he simply started to move away.”

The shadows flow on and on around them, standing in ranks around Sean. Men and women and children. As many armed as those without.

The song rises and rises and the sounds of the battle below fall away.

“He’s not the only singing now,” Azzel suddenly says.

Erik looks at his soldiers, at the dread and wonder on their faces, and the ghostly chorus is growing stronger.

And there is a familiar voice in his head once again. _-rik! Erik! Answer me!_

_Eliszabeth! Are you all right? Report!_

_Erik – we can hear the singing! What’s happening up there?_

_Sean,_ he says, simply. And then: _Are you all right? Are you still in pain? Where is Charles?_

_We are...mostly better now. Thank you. As for Charles – he’s gone to help Summers in the undercroft._

Erik permits himself a tight smile. For all he talks about his own weaknesses, Charles is easily one of the strongest persons Erik has ever known. He has never been deeper than the dark cells in which this tower imprisoned him; now he steps of his own free will into the dangerous depths further below.

“Are you simply going to sing at me, then?” the man with the eyepatch asks suddenly. “Perhaps I might sleep.”

Sean is pale and grinning when he looks over his shoulder again. “You might want to look away,” he says, over the singing of the ghosts. “Or at least move back.”

“Do it,” Erik says. “Emma, go with them. Stay with Armand.”

“And you?” she asks, startled.

“I’m still going to need to fight, am I not?”

“But Charles – ”

“ – Knows what I’m doing. As I trust that he knows what he’s doing, now that he’s in the depths of the tower.” He ignores Emma’s surprised gasp and turns to the others. “Fall back. If something goes wrong, you know what to do.”

Raven and Azzel snap to their feet and salute, and so does John.

Emma shakes her head, and reluctantly takes Armand’s hand.

Erik sees them safely to the doors, parting around the silhouette that Meggie left behind.

Over his shoulder, Sean is turning back to the man with the eyepatch. “Thank you for asking.”

To the ghosts, he says, simply, “Help me.”

The gentle melody lilts away on the ashen wind – and then the ghosts join hands, and begin to march forward, into a perfect and eerie silence.

Someone screams at the other end of the courtyard.

Erik steps up to Sean’s side, and draws his sword and his knife.

The ghosts flow around the mages standing with the man with the eyepatch – and the mages break, one after the other. Five of them clutch at each other’s hands as they run pell-mell back into the tower.

The last one, an old woman with bone-white hair, shrieks and then suddenly seizes her captor around his neck. Her voice is a deep rasp that echoes strangely around the courtyard.

Erik doesn’t recognize the words – but it looks like his enemy does, because suddenly, the man in the eyepatch falls to his knees and begins to howl.

“Justice,” the crone shouts in a strangled voice. She produces a silver dagger from somewhere in her tattered robes and drives it into the man’s shoulder.

And then she half-runs to the edges of the courtyard, clambers over the battlements with alarming speed – and _plunges_ over the side.

What can he do to help? What good can he do her? But Erik runs after her anyway, and he peers over the wall.

The old woman shrieks again – and then she is growing wings. Black feathers in her wake as she flies away, and her black cloak billowing.

Sean gasps, a horrified and strangled sound, and Erik spins back around, to the ghosts vanishing in silver mist, to a mostly empty courtyard.

To black shadows. Fear. Anger. Hatred.

He shakes his head in denial, once, and then he seizes Sean’s shoulder, all but throws him back toward the others, toward Meggie’s doors. “Tell them to run,” he growls, _“run, and don’t look back!”_

“Don’t be a fool! You _can’t_ fight that thing!” Sean yells, hand tight around Erik’s wrist.

He throws the redhead off easily. “I _can_ fight it, I _will_ fight it, even if it kills me! And every moment I’m here is one more moment the rest of you can use to get out of here alive. Now, go!”

Sean makes as if to shake his head in denial again – and Erik does something he thinks he’ll regret, and raises the point of his sword to the other man’s throat.

“ _Go_ , Sean.”

He goes, at last, shouting for Eliszabeth for some reason.

Erik watches Sean as he practically falls out of sight, and the soldiers follow in his wake.

That leaves him with this...this _thing_ that used to be the man with the eyepatch.

The man who feared and fought monsters, who imprisoned mages without flinching or any trace of regret.

One touch from a mage, and – now _he_ is the monster.

He wonders if he’ll live long enough to laugh over the bitterness of this particular irony.

How he wishes Charles were here to say something about it.

Erik looks up, and tries to remember his father’s words, his mother’s determination. Learning about stars as a boy, stars with beautiful and strange names. _Firebird. Veil. Western Cross._

 _Dragon,_ he thinks, now, as he looks up and up and up. The constellation he remembers is easy to find in the winter sky; a handful of bright stars, always appearing over the western horizon as soon as the sun sets and the brief day ends. A map for the traveler. Harbinger of good memories.

Erik remembers that his father always tried to return to wherever they’d made camp by the time those stars appeared in the sky.

That dragon is nothing like _this_.

A thin scream of rage tears through the smoke and the wind. The stones beneath his feet shake as the creature writhes from side to side, tail lashing. Its brutish head: giant teeth, a forked tongue, spines bristling around its neck like a collar. The dragon’s feet end in wicked-looking claws. As it thrashes around in its newborn agitation, its scales ripple and bristle and _move_ , tracing out the lines of muscle and sinew and bone.

Ungainly as it is now, Erik hopes the mind inside that terrible frame will stay confused for a long time. If it awakes, if this thing before him becomes a dragon in truth – he won’t stand a chance. Not alone. Not without an army, and perhaps not even with his own army. Not even if he had Jean and Summers and Raven and Azzel to stand with him.

Right now, he doesn’t even know how much of an army he still has. Are the defenses holding? How many soldiers dead and dying and wounded? Where are they?

Distractions.

He has to focus on the here and now.

He sheathes his knife and he grips his sword in both hands.

The dragon lurches forward, clumsy and lumbering.

Erik half-runs and half-ducks for cover around the battlements of the courtyard, eyes darting everywhere, trying to watch every part of the dragon, trying to get in close. His instincts scream at him. Find a place where the dragon cannot reach him. Find its vulnerable points: wings and hamstrings.

The tail moves and Erik feels his heart leap into his throat, and he throws himself to the stones. Just in time, as the spike on the end moves almost lightning-fast through the space where his head was just heartbeats ago.

_Keep moving! Stay alive! THINK!_

The dragon rears up onto its hind legs and bellows a challenge into the sky.

Erik strikes out for first blood, and he darts for the hind legs and plunges his sword into the muscle.

The dragon shrieks.

_Claw that’s a CLAW_

Erik wrenches the blade free – and both he and it go flying. Sharp spike of pain, hot and terrible, lancing up from his instep, setting the muscles in his leg screaming.

No time to think about himself, now, though, because for one long moment the fear consumes him.

If he’s thrown the sword over the edge of the tower, he’ll be lost at last.

And then, at last, there is a quiet clang.

There’s no time to be relieved that he can still find the sword; there’s no time to be guilty about damaging the blade.

He’s lying out in the open and if he doesn’t move, he could get trampled or impaled – or worse, the dragon might finally spot him and decide to attack him.

 _Move!_ he tells himself fiercely. _Crawl if you must! Move, and live!_

He hoists himself up on his elbows, and he looks around carefully.

A flash of fire, a sudden burst of distant sunlight, and it catches his eye: the blade of his sword.

The stones of the courtyard shake and ripple beneath him. Hand over hand: he moves, and every movement makes him want to scream his pain into the sky.

Erik grits his teeth and watches frantically over his shoulder, at the dragon as it thrashes in pain and fury. Closer, closer he comes to the blade – and then, suddenly, the dragon roars and his heart stops for a brief eternity. Quiet shock. The cold strike of realization.

He’s been spotted.

And Erik lifts himself to his feet, lets out a long, low groan. He seizes his sword. It hurts to turn back around, to face what is surely his death.

He thinks of a name.

_Charles._

_I give my heart to you, and the years we can’t have, the years we should have had._

He rolls to his feet.

Every breath is a lance driven into his heart.

Erik bares his teeth in challenge, and half-drops and half-falls into a ready crouch.

The dragon roars its contempt into the sky.

Another bright flash of fire in the corner of Erik’s eye.

This time, he allows himself to be distracted.

This time, he looks up to it.

_Love and laughter light your days. Sing to me of no frontiers._

He hums the melody back, though his heart shakes in fear.

The song falls out of the bleak sky, flames and a high wavering note. A voice he remembers well. The song is laced with the same power, the same uncertainty, that he sees in one particular mage’s blue-in-blue eyes.

And Erik finally recognizes where the bright flashes are coming from.

The sword in Charles’s hand moves in deliberate, sure arcs.

The dragon roars in defiance, and lashes out at its enemy, at the great flaming bird. Jaws yawning wide. Teeth snapping at Charles as he flies and flashes around the creature. His fire is reflected in the blade that he wields with grace and strength, plunging again and again into the dragon’s flesh. A collar of blood on the dragon’s scales.

Erik completes the movement at last, is finally in position to fight, and he runs forward. Slowly at first, hobbling, getting faster and faster as he comes closer. He screams in pain, and for courage, and to the memory of those who’ve already fallen today.

The first strike bites deeply into the dragon’s front leg.

Erik grips the sword in both hands. An almighty effort, and he drags it across muscle and sinew.

The dragon shrieks, higher and higher until he can no longer hear it with his ears. Instead the terrifying whine echoes in his very bones. Erik grits his teeth. Closes his eyes. Wrenches the blade free.

The dragon’s blood on his skin is a strange, sickly shade of red.

A distant pain burns in his shoulder. It is at once far sharper and far more distant than the hurt in his leg.

Erik falls to his knees and looks up, up. The dragon’s wings beat at the air. All the way up its heaving back, the head tossing wildly from side to side.

There is a sword glittering between its eyes.

And Charles on high, with his hands raised over his head. Power crackles through every line of him.

Erik can’t see his face, can’t see his eyes. Charles is a dark shadow passing judgment.

Erik puts his hand to his wounded arm, and he falls to his knees once again.

The dragon’s eyes burst into flame.

Erik smiles.

And falls into darkness.

///

Nine

Blue-in-blue eyes.

A voice calling his name.

He remembers the last time he’d fallen; the last time he’d needed to be saved.

Memory and now, past and present, as he opens his eyes.

_Serpentine blade / a sword he and I made_

_Bare hands, pride / a scar and a silver cuff_

_She would never yield / he’s been beaten down all his life_

_The look in her eyes / the way he looks at me_

There is a hand closing around Erik’s wrist. There is a voice murmuring to him.

“Get up, please.

“Trust me.”

I will, Erik thinks. I do.

A quiet laugh. “I just wanted to hear you say it again.”

Erik reaches out, and there is a hand closing around his wrist.

He opens his eyes.

Flames and thick, choking smoke.

For some reason he thinks he can hear people shouting encouragement.

And Charles is standing over him. “Don’t mind the flames. Come with me.”

“I’m not looking at them,” Erik says, and he staggers as he tries to rise to his feet. “I’m hurt.”

“I know. I’m here to get you out. I’m here to take you home.”

“Through – ” Erik waves his free hand. “Through this?”

The courtyard is wreathed in fire, and the flames are licking at the bulk of the fallen dragon.

“Through this,” Charles says.

Erik blinks. “All right.”

He gets a smile.

Up, and out.

The fire is as nothing to him.

His hand around Charles’s; Charles’s hand in his. All the long way down.

///

Ten

There is a quiet knock on the door to the smithy. Erik braces himself on his good arm and attempts to push up from his chair – but there’s a hand on his shoulder, and Charles is smiling and leaning over him. “You’re not to move around too much, remember? I don’t want your stitches to come undone. You know how everyone’s worried about you.”

“I’ve taken worse wounds, Charles,” Erik says, laughing ruefully, “and when I did, often I was left in the hands of healers who didn’t know one end of a needle from another.”

“Well, let me tell you that I almost felt sick, while Jean and Kazuko were sewing you up. You are not supposed to be torn to rags, Erik; you are not your shirts to be so easily mended.”

Erik nods, accepting the admonition. “I did not mean to insult your friend.”

“I hope that you do not. Kazuko is Kazuko, and no one is her equal at needle and thread.”

“I’m glad she’s come to join us here.”

He flinches, but only a little, as Charles’s fingers touch the wrist of his injured arm.

“I’m sorry,” he says, in the end, and he covers Charles’s hand with his own. “Are you still having problems using your hands?”

“I am fine, Erik. The pain went away quickly. More importantly – I wanted to be there,” Charles says. “You needed me to be there.”

Erik nods. He remembers seizing Charles’s hands, the hot shock of the needle as it bit into his skin, again and again. He remembers being pushed upright, blinding pain as he was moved to another bed, and he remembers looking back, at the sheets stained with his own blood. He remembers Charles biting his lips in his own pain, because Erik was crushing his hands. “You could have had them put me to sleep, saved your hands.”

“I would never,” Charles says, and puts his nose in the air, sniffing contemptuously.

Erik almost laughs and almost shrugs – until the movement pulls at his wound and he winces, grits his teeth to prevent a pained moan from escaping. When he’s sure he can speak again normally, he says, “I’m not used to being laid up like this.”

“Well, you _are_ a skilled soldier; you walked away from a fight with a dragon, didn’t you?”

He watches as Charles’s eyes darken – briefly – with the memory.

It’s been ten days, at least, and yet Erik still wakes up with the stench of blood and ash and burning stone in his nose. He wakes up, hands on Charles’s arms or shoulders or wrists or hips, urgency and fear in every line of him.

And always the understanding and the easy silence of Charles’s acceptance.

And he does the same now. Charles is covering it up, and saying, gently, “Let me wait on you for a change. How many times have you had to look after me, after all? All those nights when I woke up from my bad dreams; all the times I made you worry.”

Erik looks away, tries to hide the fondness in his smile. “I’ve lost count.”

A quiet laugh. A kiss to his brow. And he watches Charles walk away, heading for the door. A shriek of laughter, a cool breeze that blows snow across the threshold.

Erik smiles again, and this time when he attempts to get to his feet, it’s a little easier. He succeeds, and he takes a small branch from the pile of kindling nearby, sets it alight in the blazing fire.

His hands are no longer shaking as he limps around the smithy, lighting the candles scattered here and there in their wooden holders. A constellation of flames. He absently moves one candle closer to the head of the table, and then throws the smoldering branch into the fireplace.

When he looks up from his task, it’s Charles’s turn to wear a fond smile. He may be shaking his head a little, but there is no worry clouding his blue-in-blue eyes – only exasperation, and perhaps a certain affection.

“Erik,” someone calls, and he smiles when there’s a flash of blonde hair out of the corner of his eye.

Emma steps carefully around him, hands held behind her back. “How are you feeling?”

“I am not in much pain today, thank you,” he says, and he lets her wrap her arms around his waist. He lays his good hand atop her head. “I have never had such vigilant nurses – even if they pinch me from time to time.”

“You were supposed to stay still,” Emma says, muffled in his shirt and the bandages still wrapped around his midsection. “It was pinch you or force a cup of Jean’s tea down your throat.”

“Charles would never let you do that,” Erik says, chuckling softly. “If only because then he would have to deal with the rash.”

Emma chokes out a watery laugh. “You may keep telling yourself that.”

“You promised you wouldn’t tell him, Emma,” Charles says. He comes to join them, and he’s leaning down to Emma’s eye-level and he’s making a terrible face at her, pulling at his cheeks and sticking his tongue out. “Traitor.”

Erik only laughs the harder – even if it is starting to hurt him – and he allows Emma and Charles to help him back into his chair.

Summers and Jean are already at the table. Rachel is wide awake in her basket between them, clutching a small cloth flower in her fist. “You’re looking better,” Summers says.

“Next time I decide to fight a dragon mostly by myself,” Erik drawls, “please have someone knock me out and sit on me, then call in the soldiers and all the mages you can find.”

“I’ll do better. I’ll knock you out before we leave. And deal with Charles’s wrath after leading the army back home. _If_ we get home.”

Charles laughs and settles into the seat at Erik’s right hand. “If there was a chance that I could actually hold you to that promise, Summers....”

“Are you all really supposed to make fun of a sick man,” Erik says, mildly.

“You started it,” Summers counters.

It’s Jean who laughs first, turning away and clapping her hands over her mouth – and the others soon follow suit.

Erik catches Charles’s eye and grins at him, looks down briefly as Charles’s hands slide over his.

He is warm, and he is here. They are both here.

“Being entirely untruthful,” Sean says, suddenly, from the end of the table. “You’d lead that army yourself, firestarter.”

“I would not,” Charles says promptly. “But if you asked Emma....”

Emma grins and points to herself.

Sean laughs: dusty and cracked and actually amused.

The door crashes open and someone is humming, enthusiastic and off-key. The song identifies the singer – and Azzel laughs and silences Raven with a kiss, and then he’s putting a basket of food on the table. “We are sorry to be late.”

“It’s not my fault they wanted to play a game of tag in the kitchen,” Raven says, still half a sing-song, laughing as she sails around the table and wraps her arms around Charles.

Without moving his hands away from Erik’s, Charles leans back into his sister’s embrace, and cranes up to accept the kiss she bestows on his forehead.

Erik watches as Azzel rounds the table to salute him and Jean and Summers. “How are you doing, sir?”

“Better, thank you. And you and your wife?”

Azzel laughs. “We are well.”

“Be seated, please,” Jean says, smiling.

Erik looks down the table as the others move around and hand out the food. Emma is trying to make Sean sit next to her, playful pleading in her voice. “Leaving with you,” the red-haired man mock-grumbles, but he is smiling all the same.

Emma talks about the places they might see when they ride away with Logan’s army.

Azzel is rocking Rachel back and forth, and Raven is watching him with a fond look in her eyes.

Summers is writing out names on a piece of paper from his pocket: Alex’s name at the head. The soldiers and mages they’d left behind at the tower, helping the remnants of its armies and its inmates to guard the undercroft and its horrors.

Charles and Jean are speaking in low voices about the mages who have come back with them to the village, among them his friend Kazuko and the small group of healers who had followed her.

He lets the byplay wash over him, soothing if strange. The faces of people he’s known for years and the faces of people who have just come into his life. Comrades and companions and Charles.

Family.

Home at last.

In his mind, there is an image of a woman nodding and saying a silent, loving goodbye.

He smiles, and closes his eyes briefly – _Goodbye_ – and she’s gone.

He knows he’ll never see her again.

And now for some reason he is watching as Charles nods and finishes his conversation with Jean, as she turns back to the rest of the table. He passes his hands over two of the nearest candles, and the two flames gutter and die out with a quiet hiss.

“Charles,” he says.

“Erik,” is the response. “Let the others be for a moment. Just look at me. Will you give me your hands?”

Erik moves his injured arm, and he places both hands atop the table, though he winces as he does so.

The pain falls away when Charles places one of his hands over both of Erik’s. With the other hand, he moves the two candles, still smoking, next to their wrists.

Erik watches as Charles closes his eyes and leans forward, as he presses a kiss to his forehead. Erik smiles, and murmurs, “Are you doing what I think you’re doing? My bandages would not serve you well for ribbons, I’m afraid. A bad omen.”

“One we can turn to the good,” Charles says, and shifts his hands.

Erik smiles and turns his hands palms up, watches as Charles grips his wrists gently.

“I’d be with you no matter what happens to us,” Charles continues. “Through war and storm and pain and sorrow, through our best and our worst. I’d not leave you, though the world should come to an end.”

“It feels as though we have already lived through one of those.”

A small, amused smile. “And who led me out of darkness?”

Erik smiles back. “The one you led out of the flames.”

The candles next to their joined hands burst into a bright blue flame.

_fin_  



End file.
